"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'"
-Isaac Asimov

" My approach to understanding the full implications of Gödel's work is mathematically analogous to the ideas of thermodynamics and Boltzmann and statistical mechanics. You might say, not completely seriously, that what I'm proposing is 'thermodynamical epistemology'!"
- G. Chaitin

After a decade of painstaking research, federal and university scientists have reconstructed the 1918 influenza virus that killed 50 million people worldwide. Like the flu viruses now raising alarm bells in Asia, the 1918 virus was a bird flu that jumped directly to humans, the scientists reported. To shed light on how the virus evolved, the United States Department of Health and Human Services published the full genome of the 1918 influenza virus on the Internet in the GenBank database.

This is extremely foolish. The genome is essentially the design of a weapon of mass destruction. No responsible scientist would advocate publishing precise designs for an atomic bomb, and in two ways revealing the sequence for the flu virus is even more dangerous.

Why one species branches into two is a question that has haunted evolutionary biologists since Darwin.

Given our planet's rich biodiversity, "speciation" clearly happens regularly, but scientists cannot quite pinpoint the driving forces behind it.

Now, researchers studying a family of butterflies think they have witnessed a subtle process, which could be forcing a wedge between newly formed species.

The team, from Harvard University, US, discovered that closely related species living in the same geographical space displayed unusually distinct wing markings.

These wing colours apparently evolved as a sort of "team strip", allowing butterflies to easily identify the species of a potential mate.

This process, called "reinforcement", prevents closely related species from interbreeding thus driving them further apart genetically and promoting speciation.

ESP, UFOs and reincarnation are treated with respect at the world's most bizarre scientific conference

Roger Nelson's formal credentials are in the respectable field of experimental psychology, but the project he has been working on since 1998 would make plenty of scientists cringe. Nelson heads the Global Consciousness Project, which is based on the theory that emotionally charged world events will cause blips in the output of random-number generators scattered around the globe. He and his colleagues believe they have already documented that effect in the aftermath of Princess Di's death, the 9/11 attacks and, more benignly, in the wave of international optimism that seems to settle over the world each New Year's Day. The simple electronic devices that generate the random numbers, he argues, may be picking up some sort of planetwide field of consciousness.

Nelson would have a tough time getting this stuff published in a major journal like Science or Nature. But he doesn't have to, thanks to an organization called the Society for Scientific Exploration, or S.S.E., which held its annual meeting outside Gainesville, Fla., last week.

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.
- Isaac Asimov

It took a million years to move from counting pebbles to the elaborations of quantum mechanics. Certainly this was an arduous migration of the multitude -- not a private party of physicists, but the Long March of the entire human race.
- Anonymous

Is science a young person's game? Many think so; Einstein, Bohr, and Kelvin come to mind as confirming instances. Indeed, youthfulness is alleged to provide many advantages in scientific research. First, some claim that young scientists have more time and energy than their older colleagues. Thus, while older scientists are occupied with gate-keeping and administrative duties, their younger colleagues devote their time to research. As a result, young scientists are thought to be more productive than their older colleagues.

Second, some suggest that young scientists are more creative. Things that older colleagues consider to be beyond question are more apt to be challenged by young scientists. As a result, young scientists are alleged to be responsible for the more radical innovations in science.

Third, some suggest that young scientists are quicker than their older colleagues with respect to accepting innovations. Old scientists, we are told, are especially resistant to innovation, because they are the ones responsible for yesterday's innovations that are today's orthodoxies.

Underlying these claims is the conviction that young scientists play a key role in the process of scientific change. These views about the advantages of youthfulness in science probably contribute to making science an attractive career to young people. The young are apt to be enticed into a career that offers them the opportunity to rise to a position of power quickly. In many other careers, leadership positions are reserved for older people.

All three of these popular views concerning the advantages of youthfulness are mistaken; critical scrutiny of the available data reveals a very different picture about young scientists. Before proceeding to show this, let me be clear about who counts as a young scientist. Some mathematicians and physicists suggest that after the age of 30 a scientist is no longer young. These are the sorts of people who believe the myths outlined above. I will count as young all scientists aged less than 35 years or younger. Scientists 36 to 45 years old count as middle-aged, and scientists aged 46 years and older are considered old.

The available data suggest that the middle-aged scientist is most productive and most inclined to make a revolutionary discovery. Despite great variation in the output of individual scientists throughout their careers, if we examine the aggregate output of many scientists, it rises from early in their career, reaches a peak in the middle, and then begins to decline thereafter.1

Google Inc. plans to announce on Thursday that it is adding a new search service aimed at scientists and academic researchers.

Google Scholar, which was scheduled to go online Wednesday evening at scholar.google.com, is a result of the company's collaboration with a number of scientific and academic publishers and is intended as a first stop for researchers looking for scholarly literature like peer-reviewed papers, books, abstracts and technical reports.

Gordon Rugg cracked the 400-year-old mystery of the Voynich manuscript. Next up: everything from Alzheimer's to the origins of the universe.

Two years ago, an Englishman named Gordon Rugg slipped back in time. Night after night he spread his papers on the kitchen table once his children had gone to bed. Working on faux parchment with a steel-nibbed calligraphic pen, he scribbled a strange, unidentifiable, vaguely medieval script. Transliterated into the Roman alphabet, some of the words read: "qopchedy qokedydy qokoloky qokeedy qokedy shedy." As he wrote, he struggled to get inside the mind of the person who had first scrawled this incomprehensible text some 400 years ago.

By day, Rugg, a 48-year-old psychologist, teaches in the computer science department of Keele University, near Manchester, England. By night, as an intellectual exercise, he has been researching one of the world's great oddities: the Voynich manuscript, a hand-lettered book written in an unknown code that has frustrated cryptographers since its discovery in an Italian villa in 1912. How impregnable is the Voynich? During World War II, US Army code breakers - the guys who blew away Nazi ciphers - grappled with the manuscript in their spare time and came up empty. Since then, decoding the book's contents has become an obsession for geeks and puzzle nuts everywhere.

Then came Rugg. In three months, he cooked up the most persuasive explanation yet for the 234-page text: Sorry, folks, there is no code - it's a hoax! Lifelong Voynichologists were impressed with his reasoning and proofs, even if they were a little chagrined. "The Voynich is such a challenge," says Rugg, "such a social activity. But then along comes someone who says 'Oh, it's just a lot of meaningless gibberish.' It's as if we're all surfers, and the sea has dried up."

When the news of Rugg's breakthrough was published last winter, everyone missed the bigger story. Rugg cracked the Voynich not because he was smarter, but because he focused on what everyone else had missed. Then again, this came naturally to Rugg: He has made a career out of studying how experts acquire knowledge yet screw up nevertheless. In 1996, he and his colleagues developed a rigorous method for peering over the shoulders of experts - doctors, software engineers, pilots, physicists - watching how they work and think, testing their logic, and uncovering ways to help them solve problems.

Rugg calls it the verifier approach, and the Voynich was its first major test. If Rugg gets his way, verifiers will revolutionize the scientific method and help solve other seemingly unsolvable mysteries, such as the origins of the universe or the cause of Alzheimer's disease.

An unexplained effect during solar eclipses casts doubt on General Relativity.

“Assume nothing” is a good motto in science. Even the humble pendulum may spring a surprise on you. In 1954 Maurice Allais, a French economist who would go on to win, in 1988, the Nobel prize in his subject, decided to observe and record the movements of a pendulum over a period of 30 days. Coincidentally, one of his observations took place during a solar eclipse. When the moon passed in front of the sun, the pendulum unexpectedly started moving a bit faster than it should have done.

Since that first observation, the “Allais effect”, as it is now called, has confounded physicists. If the effect is real, it could indicate a hitherto unperceived flaw in General Relativity—the current explanation of how gravity works.

Chemistry starts with the movement of electrons, a motion that takes place in a matter of attoseconds — a timescale almost too small to comprehend. An attosecond is one billionth of a billionth of a second, and there are more attoseconds in a minute than there have been minutes in the history of the universe.

With a flash of light to stimulate an electron and attosecond x-ray flashes to follow its activities, scientists could directly observe such phenomena as an atom becoming ionized, or the bonding of two or more atoms into molecules. Sound like a technology for the far-distant future? Not according to a pair of researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Alexander Zholents and William Fawley, physicists at Berkeley Lab's Center for Beam Physics in the Accelerator and Fusion Research Division, have an idea for creating intense bursts of x-rays in pulse lengths of about 100 attoseconds. If you picture Niels Bohr's classic 1913 model of a hydrogen atom, it takes about 100 attoseconds for the electron to orbit the proton.

Further investigation of the Bush administration's abuse of science.

On February 18, 2004, 62 preeminent scientists including Nobel laureates, National Medal of Science recipients, former senior advisers to administrations of both parties, numerous members of the National Academy of Sciences, and other well-known researchers released a statement titled Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policy Making. In this statement, the scientists charged the Bush administration with widespread and unprecedented "manipulation of the process through which science enters into its decisions." The scientists’ statement made brief reference to specific cases that illustrate this pattern of behavior. In conjunction with the statement, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) released detailed documentation backing up the scientists’ charges in its report, Scientific Integrity in Policy Making.

Since the release of the UCS report in February, the administration has continued to undermine the integrity of science in policy making seemingly unchecked. Many scientists have spoken out about their frustration with an administration that has undermined the quality of the science that informs policy making by suppressing, distorting, or manipulating the work done by scientists at federal agencies and on scientific advisory panels.

Scientific knowledge has a vital, if limited, role to play in shaping our moral values and helping us to frame wiser judgments. Ethical values are natural and open to examination in the light of evidence and reason.

Can science and reason be used to develop ethical judgments? Many theists claim that without religious foundations, "anything goes," and social chaos will ensue. Scientific naturalists believe that secular societies already have developed responsible ethical norms and that science and reason have helped us to solve moral dilemmas. How and in what sense this occurs are vital issues that need to be discussed in contemporary society, for this may very well be the hottest issue of the twenty-first century.

Dramatic breakthroughs on the frontiers of science provide new powers to humans, but they also pose perplexing moral quandaries. Should we use or limit these scientific discoveries, such as the cloning of humans? Much of this research is banned in the United States and restricted in Canada. Should scientists be permitted to reproduce humans by cloning (as we now do with animals), or is this too dangerous? Should we be allowed to make "designer babies?" Many theologians and politicians are horrified by this; many scientists and philosophers believe that it is not only inevitable but justifiable under certain conditions. There were loud cries against in vitro fertilization, or artificial insemination, only two generations ago, but the procedure proved to be a great boon to childless couples. Many religious conservatives are opposed to therapeutic stem-cell research on fetal tissues, because they think that "ensoulment" occurs with the first division of cells. Scientists are appalled by this censorship of scientific research, since the research has the potential to cure many illnesses; they believe those who oppose it have ignored the welfare of countless numbers of human beings. There are other equally controversial issues on the frontiers of science: Organ transplants-who should get them and why? Is the use of animal organs to supply parts for human bodies wrong? Is transhumanism reforming what it means to be human? How shall we control AIDS-is it wicked to use condoms, as some religious conservatives think, or should this be a high priority in Africa and elsewhere? Does global warming mean we need a radical transformation of industry in affluent countries? Is homosexuality genetic, and if so, is the denial of same-sex marriage morally wrong? How can we decide such questions? What criteria may we draw upon?