Rosa Rubicondior

'Wandering stones' of Death Valley explained : Nature News & Comment The 'mystery' of the 'Wandering Stones' o...

Yawning Spreads Like a Plague in Wolves | Science | Smithsonian More evidence emerged this week that the ability to empathise with members...

Spot the liar. Dr Paul D. Ackerman , Creationist: Around the turn of the century, the famous scientist Lord Kelvin created difficulties ...

The German Cockroach, Blatella germanica . Image: Alex Wild/Visuals Unlimited/Corbis. Meet the lodgers: Wildlife in the great indoors - ...

Top Vatican figure in row over child abuse comments. A senior Vatican Official astounded the Australian victims of peodophile priests by t...

Blue-tailed-Emerald, Chlorostilbon mellisugus . Photo: Bjørn Christian Tørrissen Evolution of sweet taste perception in hummingbirds by t...

Chimps show empathy by mimicking pupil size - life - 22 August 2014 - New Scientist More evidence guaranteed to trigger the avoidance refl...

As regular readers will know, some two years ago I posted a challenge to a Twitter user then using the account name @Sacerdotus who had been...

Baka pygmies, West Africa African pygmies evolved their short stature twice - health - 18 August 2014 - New Scientist A paper publishe...

Homo floresiensis Scientists at war over claim that Flores hobbit man is modern human with Down's syndrome | Science | The Observer ...

Meet your maker: Homing in on the ancestor of all life - life - 12 August 2014 - New Scientist Creationist pseudo-scientists have a proble...

Someone posted a question in our Why Atheism? Facebook group the other day asking which religion was the worst, especially in the context ...

A paper published recently in PNAS , showing how the earliest forms of multicellular life probably evolved and diversified according to a f...

Neanderthal family (artists impression) Photograph: Nikola Solic/Reuters To me, watching a science grow and develop is what makes it more...

Albrecht Dürer Lot Fleeing with his Daughters from Sodom (1498) The biblical story of Lot is another strange tale with no obvious reason...

Some time ago I wrote about Thomas Paine's debunking of the notion that the Pentateuch was written by Moses, as though supposedly writin...

Heligmosomoides polygyrus Janice Murray & Maizels Laboratory/University of Edinburgh Heligmosomoides polygyrus...

Dinosaurs shrank for 50 million years to become birds - life - 31 July 2014 - New Scientist I was surprised and more than a little disappo...

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...