Starting today, Twitter has a new resident: the Cool Science of the Day twitter feed (@CoolScienceOTD).  This feed is a joint production of the Huffines Institute and a group of highly motivated, really smart doctoral students at Texas A&M University.  This twitter feed aims to highlight the really exciting, adventuresome, and impactful science that is being done in today’s world.  Too many times, science in today’s media and social settings is characterized as boring, overly complex, and not ...

Then there are the weeks in sports where you think: “How can this stuff really happen?  Are people really this maniacal and self-serving?”  Unfortunately, there are times when your naivety is stripped and it really appears that even decisions about appropriate health-care for athletes are decided by incompetent idiots on power trips.  Two extensive investigative reports this week dealing with the health of football athletes show convincingly that unfortunately, this incompetence, greed, and po...

One of our goals at the Huffines Institute is to encourage activity. But we also encourage common sense when you exercise. I don’t know if it is the time of the year (spring), a lack of proper guidance by society, or just youthful beliefs of invincibility, but the general lack of concern for their own basic safety that I’ve seen exhibited recently by runners, pedestrians, or bicyclists gives me pause.

Science always brings us new facts that challenge us and challenge our perceptions of the world. For example, over the past five years, we have begun to see research into a type of compound, produced by the body, that is probably responsible for what we know as the ‘runner’s high’. Most of us know that the ‘runner’s high’ is the euphoric feeling that occurs when you run, but it also occurs when you do any task that is physiologically difficult. Linked with the runner’s high are a wide a...

For those of you that have written wondering where your podcasts have been, thanks for missing us (for those that didn't miss us, well...thanks for knowing we exist!).  As you can tell, we are back today, starting our weekly podcasts up again.  I had at least one wag who suggested that we were still partying from our 100th podcast, and while that would have been fun, unfortunately that wasn't the case.