Rosa Rubicondior

With so many to choose from, it's difficult to decide which of the various folk tales, invented 'histories' and origin ...

Killer sperm ravages internal organs of luckless worms - life - 30 July 2014 - New Scientist I've mentioned before how, as two divergi...

This is my last blog for a while on the fascinating topic of mimicry in animals and plants. Previously I wrote about Batesian and Müllerian...

Decisions ripple through flocks of birds like a wave - physics-math - 27 July 2014 - New Scientist One of the most spectacular sites in na...

Having blogged a couple of days ago about the role of mimicry in evolution I decided to look more closely at the subject, especially the wi...

Horse chestnut leaves infested with Cameraria ohridella lavae. If you live in Southern England, for an example of very recent evolution ...

Which ones would you pick up? A friend asked me the other day to explain how mimicry can play a role in evolution. This is my attempt to do...

Ungulate saliva inhibits a grass–endophyte mutualism A fascinating example of both evolutionary cooperation and an evolutionary arms race ...

2 January 2013: Astronomers have determined that the Milky Way may contain as many as 400 billion exoplanets, with almost every sta...

Most theists will deny that they do it but it's usually easy to demonstrate that religious beliefs are not based an objective assessmen...

Fiendish wheat genome reveals grain's history : Nature News & Comment It's been another bad week for the Intelligent Design in...

Hamilton O. Smith. (Photo: Jane Gitschier © PLoS Genetics ) I'm homing in on the genetic essence of life - opinion - 14 July 2014 - N...

Long-tailed Tit ( Aegithalos caudatus ) Browsing through my Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) magazine, Nature's Home...

Amphibians' swim stroke has lasted 270 million years - life - 15 July 2014 - New Scientist Fascinating pictures of 270 million year-ol...

The Norway spruce genome sequence and conifer genome evolution : Nature : Nature Publishing Group Here's a fascinating piece of resear...

The Catholic Church in Germany is witnessing an astonishing collapse in public trust and is haemorrhaging members at an unprece...

Source: Iakes Ezkurdia, et. al., Multiple evidence strands suggest that there may be as few as 19 000 human protein-coding genes * Size o...

Credit: Gleison Miranda/FUNAI/Survival Uncontacted tribe in Brazil ends its isolation | Science/AAAS | News News that a previously isol...

"We will not take one step backward with regards to how we will deal with this problem, and the sanctions that must be imposed. We ha...

Tibetans Tibetan altitude gene came from extinct human species - life - 02 July 2014 - New Scientist The evidence that archaic, diversi...

Consciousness on-off switch discovered deep in brain - life - 02 July 2014 - New Scientist One of the favourite arguments used by religiou...

Green River Formation varves One of my favourite creationist pseudo-scientists must be the psychologist with no qualifications in science or...

Genetic analysis of hair samples attributed to yeti, bigfoot and other anomalous primates Last October I reported on a tentative claim by ...

The thing about creationists is that they are nothing if not predictable. What's the betting that, if someone hasn't already done...

It's always fun, if you have nothing better to do, than to go to a creationists site and play spot the fallacies. For example, this stu...

A group-specific arbitrary tradition in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) - Online First - Springer Ever since Richard Dawkins coined the term...

You can say one thing about The Intelligent Designer - it doesn't let liberal sentimentality, compassion or morality get in the way of a...

Antibiotic resistance focus of UK’s Longitude Prize : Nature News Blog Great news that, by popular vote, the £10 million ($17 million) Lon...

Theists have a problem with souls. The problem is that they were invented in ignorant times when people knew nothing of the microscopic st...

Stone Age worm egg hints at origins of modern scourge - health - 20 June 2014 - New Scientist News that the earliest known evidence of the...

A creationists 'explains' two sorts of evolution. Note the lie that evolutionary biologists claim trilobites were our ancestors ...

Defining British Identity | British Social Attitudes Survey 31 Taxpayers' cash should not be used to fund faith schools, say voters | ...

What would it take to convince a creationist that Earth is not just a few thousand years old? To be frank, the answer to that is probably ...

Massive 'ocean' discovered towards Earth's core - environment - 12 June 2014 - New Scientist News this week that geologists le...

It's sometimes fun to read through the Bible and work out which of the tales in it is the least plausible, the most pointle...

Figures compiled and published in British Social Attitudes 30 (2013 Edition) make grim reading for mainstream religions in Britain. Self-i...

Provisional figures for 2012 released by the UK Government Office of National Statistics (ONS) today show that the number of marriages in E...

Students Build the First Eukaryotic Chromosome from Scratch - Scientific American Interesting news recently in Scientific American . Stude...

"Science can't explain love! (And because science can't explain love, it can't explain anything. And because love exists, t...