Jeff Danner

I mentioned in an earlier post (A Science Question for Michele Bachmann) that science is often the first casualty of presidential politics. Here is an example. When Governor and Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry was...

Yesterday an earthquake measuring 5.8 on the Richter Scale struck central Virginia and was felt up and down the East Coast. I was sitting at my desk in RTP when I felt my office building begin to shake. At first I thought it was...

    In honor of Back to School Week, Common Science is publishing an homage to the world’s greatest cheat sheet, the Periodic Table of the Elements. Somewhere during the first week of high school chemistry (yes, I know some of...

On July 19th, 400 people assembled in the Fearrington barn for an event called Fracking Bewareness to hear a cautionary message about the potential to drill for natural gas in North Carolina using a technique called hydraulic...

Making electricity is easy. You take a coil of wire, you spin it near a strong magnet and you get electricity. Getting the coil to spin is, oddly, the more challenging part. I’ll explain this below, but first let’s talk about my...

Loyal readers will have noticed that I skipped last week’s blog entry as my family and I were on summer vacation. I don’t normally post on Fridays, but when I woke up this morning and heard that the forecasted high temperatures...

When I travel around Orange County I am heartened to see all of the farms. If you have been reading my blog you will know that I believe that areas, like ours, with compact towns surrounded by productive fields are going to...

OK, so this is a science blog, not a political blog. However, when politicians wander into the science realm and the media chooses not to engage, Common Science is going to step in. As I mentioned in a recent post, scientific...

As I continue this series on petroleum it can be difficult at times to determine the best order in which to cover which topics. If you have been following along so far you should have a good feel for the following: All petroleum...

If we are going to use the forum of the Common Science blog to discuss matters of consequence to Chapelboro, I am going to have to persist in the use of multi-part series. I hope you have been following the series on petroleum...