Topics

A coconut has been detained by Maldivian police on suspicion of vote-rigging in a key presidential election. The coconut, described as "young", was found near a school that will be used as a polling station on Saturday on the remote Kaafu atoll, one of the hundreds of islands that comprise the Indian Ocean archipelago state. …

Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai, who survived a Taliban assassination attempt last year, was honored Friday with the Children’s Peace Prize for her work promoting education for girls in her homeland.   The 16-year-old said she accepted the prize in the historic Knights’ Hall in The Hague “on behalf of all of the children in the …

For every major event, there is usually a theory that argues it was due to a conspiracy. Conspiracy theories are seemingly more popular than ever, so how do supposedly rational people get caught in their tangled webs? With constant revelations about government surveillance and possibleimpending war, this must be a fertile time for conspiracy theories. You know …

Nearly 20,000 fossils in Britain have been scanned and uploaded onto the Web, allowing the public to download them and print intricate replicas. Thousands of prehistoric fossils have been rescued from dusty museum archives and made available online by the British Geological Survey as highly detailed 3-D models. Researchers and the public can now access almost 20,000 …

Suspected Taliban militants shot dead the Indian author Sushmita Banerjee, writer of a popular book about her dramatic escape from the Taliban in the 90s, in eastern Afghan province of Paktika on Wednesday night, police said on Thursday. "We found her bullet riddled body near Madrassa on the outskirts of Sharan city (the provincial capital) …

Ed Suominen was raised in a small sect of Lutheran Christianity called  Laestadianism. Of the 32,000 denominations into which Christianity has fractured, his is one of the more conservative. Members believe in the literal truth of the Bible, including the creation story. They eschew sins like drinking, dancing, watching television, wearing earrings, and playing school sports. …

As I have been preparing for my last post on SciEd, I’ve reflected on why I became a science educator to begin with.  And I realize it’s because I strongly believe that knowledge is an important tool to improve our lives and it should be shared with others.  This is strange however, because even though …

The recent push in Quebec to ban religious clothing and symbols such as the burka and niqab reignited the heated debate about the role of the state in preventing religious abuse of vulnerable people, mainly women and children. To some, this proposed ban is the result of the burka's association with anti-democratic ideology and misogynistic gender relations, while to …

Bats and dolphins, despite their distance on the evolutionary tree of life, both possess an uncommon ability among mammals: echolocation. Now, scientists have discovered that the similarities go down to the genetic level as well as the physical —  bats and dolphins independently underwent many of the same genetic changes that resulted in their special …

It has been nearly three years since The Moral Landscape was first published in English, and in that time it has been attacked by readers and nonreaders alike. Many seem to have judged from the resulting cacophony that the book’s central thesis was easily refuted. However, I have yet to encounter a substantial criticism that …

 Researchers at Johns Hopkins and the National Institutes of Health have identified a compound that dramatically bolsters learning and memory when given to mice with a Down syndrome-like condition on the day of birth. As they report in the Sept. 4 issue of Science Translational Medicine, the single-dose treatment appears to enable the cerebellum of the …

An infamous cult leader known as "Black Jesus", who was suspected of cannibalism, has been chopped to death in a remote Papua New Guinea village, reports said. Steven Tari, a convicted rapist, had been on the run since escaping from a prison in Madang in the Pacific nation's east during a mass break-out with 48 …