After steering the Lewis wind farm proposal though a six year development process, the Scottish Government has decided not to consent to the proposal. The Scottish Energy Minster is reported as saying that the proposal by Lewis Windpower to…

International negations on climate change sometimes give the impression that a lot of hot air is raised for nothing: Politicians, policy makers and scientists alike gain air miles on their way to countless conferences, thereby emitting non-…

There was a sad story last week about a young woman who died unexpectedly at the age of 19.   She was on the organ donor register, and her own mother was on the waiting list for a kidney donation, but the mother was refused one of…

The Queensland Government, in Australia, has announced it will ban cosmetic surgery in people under 18 years of age. Other states, such as New South Wales, have stated they will also consider restricting access by teenagers to cosmetic enha…

Two cambridge researchers have found that  found that the amount of money a male financial trader makes in a day is correlated with his testosterone level. The pair – John Coates and Joe Herbert – also found that a trader&#…

Drug company Merck and its product Vioxx are in the news again. An article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) has examined the documents from the legal proceedings against Merck in connection with the withdrawal of Vi…

A paper in Nature Neuroscience by Soon, Brass, Heinze and Haynes has demonstrated that it is possible (in the case of a simple decision about pressing buttons) to predict what the decision will be and when it will happen several seconds bef…

There has been an increasing buzz in the papers regarding the impending launch of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Some of this concerns the possibility that it will lead to a disaster which destroys the world. This certainly sounds unlikel…

In response to Anders Sandberg’s post on the Large Hadron Collider. The physicists responses to worries about the risks posed by the LHC make it unclear whether they understand the moral issue. They may have the power, but they do not…

Recent weeks have given us several occasions to reflect on the nature of parenthood. First we had the unavoidably salacious reports about the first pregnant man, Thomas Beatie—who turned out to be a woman who has had a sex change operation …