There have been somewhere around a dozen cases this summer of water-carrying aircraft having to turn back from a wildfire scene because a personal drone was flying nearby, filming it. U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire has sponsored a bill that would make such...

The troubled Plymouth Nuclear Power Station on Boston's South Shore is going to close, its owner, Entergy said Tuesday. This isn't entirely a surprise, since the plant was facing a big safety-upgrade bill, but it puts more strain on New England's power grid by...

Excellent interview in the New York Times about the Nobel Prize in Medicine given to Prof. Tu Youyou concerning malaria. (Read the whole thing here.) Tu based her work on materials that were found by studying the pharmacopoeia* of traditional Chinese medicine, which...

I have been organizing and moderating monthly Science Cafe discussions for four years, including discussion of hot-button topics like climate change and vaccinations. But in all those years, only one session has gotten so heated that I had to tell people in the...

I'm not a car guy, in the sense of somebody who salivates over particular models or spends Saturdays working on my vehicle, although I can appreciate good engineering and design in a semi-detached manner, and I enjoy driving a stick shift for reasons I can't...

This is the closest I will ever come to fame, I suspect: I am now a member of The Luxuriant Flowing, Former, or Facial Hair Club for Science Journalists run by the irrepressible Marc Abrahams, chief pooh-bah of the Ig Nobel awards and the Annals of Improbable...

According to a database compiled by the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College (love that name - "the drone" is much cooler than "drones" for some reason), three groups in New Hampshire have received an exemption from the FAA to fly drones: JS Photography...

Vermont is a leader in large-scale composting and has mandated that virtually all food waste must stop going to landfills by 2020. But it's finding that large-scale composting has some nasal complications. As Seven Days reports: The stink at the compost facility on...

The Chronicle for Higher Education reports that MIT is proposing to use its own free open online courses as a filter to sort through all the people who want to be in master's programs there. (Story is here) Students who do well in a series of free online courses and a...

Vaccines work like this: We're injected with controlled doses of disease-causing microbes, either dead or live, and our system creates antibodies to fight the disease. Those antibodies linger in our bloodstream so when we encounter the microbes later on, we're ready...