In his state of the union address on February 12, 2013, President Obama said:

"Now, if we want to make the best products, we also have to invest in the best ideas. Every dollar we invested to map the human genome returned $140 to our economy -- every...

From monsters living in our bodies to real-life "zombie" cells, this week's science news has a peculiar sci-fi/horror twist to it. Monsters? Zombies? Fun!

I sat down with HuffPost Live producer Caroline Modarressy-Tehrani to make sense of it all and count down the top...

Did you know that only one in ten of the cells in your body is actually human? That's right. A whopping 90 percent of your cells are bacterial, viral, or parasitic in nature.

The NIH's Human Microbiome Project is ambitiously aiming to characterize the microbial communities living...

Happy Darwin Day! February 12th marks the anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth. In celebration, I managed to dig up some little known details about his life.

I spoke with David Quammen, author of "The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making...

We're all too familiar with tears welling up in our eyes--brought on by stress, sadness, or even laughter. But why exactly does feeling things make liquid come out of our eyes? And why is that uniquely human? After all, we're the only species that sheds emotional tears.

To unravel the...

As America mourned the loss of 20 innocent school children and six staff members in the tragic Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, we all had one question in mind: Why did this happen?

This may have been the most harrowing mass shooting in recent history, but it's not...

From four-stranded DNA to radioactive fish to a disco clam, I had a chance to count down the top five science stories of the week with HuffPost Live producer/host Alyona Minkovski.

She gave me 30 seconds to recap the news--see for yourself...

Jet lag: after days of travel, it's there when you're sleeping and when you're awake.

Most of us know what jet lag feels like. According to the American Sleep Association, nearly 93 percent of travelers will experience it at some point. But do you know why...

From a gross spider video gone viral to a new study about violent video games, the week was full of interesting science news. I had a chance to count down the top five stories in science with HuffPost Live producer/host Alyona Minkovski.

She gave...

Researchers may have discovered a way to protect against the transmission of HIV--a worldwide epidemic that now infects about 35 million people.

Nobel Laureate Dr. David Baltimore and colleagues at his Caltech lab are injecting mice with a powerful prophylaxis called VIP. And guess...

From an incredible look at a giant squid to the International Space Station, I counted down the top five science stories of the week with HuffPost Live producer/host Jacob Soboroff--and he gave me only 30 seconds for the rundown.

Did I make it in time? It...

The Mona Lisa is arguably the most famous painting in the world. Have you ever wondered why? Leonardo Da Vinci was masterful at manipulating our own visual shortcomings to make us feel something beautiful, complicated, even unsettling. There's just something about her smile.

Dr. Margaret Livingstone,...

Have you ever stopped to ask yourself, "what is time?" We all understand its passage intuitively, experientially. But does time actually exist? Is it a force of nature? A tangible entity? Or is time a human construct--an attempt to comprehend the incomprehensible?

I spoke with theoretical physicist and perhaps the...

What is the definition of life? And how will we recognize it if we see it elsewhere in the cosmos?

These are questions that have plagued scientists and philosophers for centuries. Now, astrobiologists at Arizona State University are looking at these questions with fresh eyes.

They...

Have you ever wondered whether all this--you, your life, the universe--is just a sophisticated computer simulation?

Martin Savage, a physicist at the University of Washington, thinks we can't discount the idea. In fact, he and two colleagues (Silas Beane and Zohreh Davoudi) published a paper in...

HuffPost Live Producer/Host Jacob Soboroff challenged me to countdown the top five science stories of the week in under a minute. I think I did a pretty good job, if I do say so myself (which I do). Watch above! Laugh! Learn! SCIENCE!!

Oh, and you can watch...

In a nutshell: the singularity marks a moment when technology trumps the human brain, and the limitations of the mind are surpassed by artificial intelligence.

Some futurists argue that such a paradigm shift is on the horizon--and this progress of technology may even enhance our own human intelligence....

Have you ever heard the term string theory and wondered WTF it means? When it comes to theoretical physics, it seems like there are a lot of larger-than-life concepts that have made their way into our everyday conversations. But how often do we stop to understand what they...

After decades in space, NASA's Voyager 1 probe recently made its way to the "magnetic highway," a region at the edge of our solar system, where the magnetic field of our own sun meets that of interstellar space. And as the spacecraft continues its journey into the milky...

As 2012 comes to a close, I'd like to take a moment to bid farewell to a few congressmen who were voted out of office this year, hopefully for their antiscience views. But let's not get too excited. There are still many, many politicians left in office who deny global...