From Houston Chronicle, October 29, 2005: Richard Errett Smalley, a gifted chemist who shared a Nobel Prize for the discovery of buckyballs, helped pioneer the field of nanotechnology and became Houston’s most notable scientist, died Friday afternoon after a six-year struggle with cancer. He was 62. Smalley possessed prodigious talent both within the lab, where…

There is not much good news on the avian flu front. Uncertainty and resulting anxiety may be causing panic even before a full blown epidemic, let alone a pandemic is in sight.  It is reported that doctors are being flooded with requests for prescriptions of Tamiflu, the antiviral drug, believed by many experts to be…

I am convinced that Houston’s pathetic NFL team, The Houston Texans (winless this season) would have had a far better winning record if they had used some imagination and foresight and called themselves The Texas Fire Ants. This interesting little story in Scientific American shows that there is more to an ant’s life than the…