What do diamonds and chocolate have in common?  Well, urban legend says girls love them both.  Maybe we can add volcanoes if we are using correlational woo.A previously unrecognized volcanic process similar to one used in chocolate manufacturing is important in the dynamics of volcanic ...

Riding into a black hole is a fun mental exercise, so popular, there is a game about riding a train in a black hole and even a song by Bare Knuckles – the scientific rigor of these may be questioned.Ethan recently told us what to expect when we travel close to a black hole and then further inside ...

Your cay may soon have a new dashboard, one made of a flexible plastic and oxide layer that could be integrated into the car front window to give the driver direct informationThe MULTIFLEXIOXIDES project is designed to develop new cost-efficient, long lasting, light, flexible and transparent devices ...

In this sorry age for Supersymmetry (SUSY) phenomenologists, it is quite easy to step on an aching toe while discussing the results of the Large Hadron Collider experiments, whose results have let these physicists down by excluding the presence of SUSY where most of them used to put their moneys ...

Based on new fossil evidence, the age of the Rhine river is five million years older than previously believed.The famous Rhine of song and legend flows through Switzerland, Austria, Germany and the Netherlands on its way to the North Sea. The catchment area of the Rhine, around 1 ...

How can basically honest scientists using a rigorous methodology have different data?  Numerical models are tricky business and while climate scientists are rapidly becoming experts in statistics and creating better models, that was not always the case.One vital component of getting clean ...

Last week, word came from Prudhoe Bay that sent chills through me as surely as if I’d been standing in the Alaskan North Slope drilling outpost myself. The United States Department of Energy – in collaboration with energy giant ConocoPhillips and the Japanese nationalized minerals corporation ...

A new paper by Natural Resources Defense Council says hydraulic fracturing (fracking) generates massive amounts of polluted wastewater in in the Marcellus Shale that threatens the health of drinking water supplies, rivers, streams, and groundwater - and that federal and state regulations ...

A group of studies says that salmon raised in man-made hatcheries can harm wild salmon through competition for food and habitat. Salmon, which survived millions of years of evolution, are in danger from...salmon.The studies provide new evidence that fast-growing hatchery fish compete with ...

My very first mentor in cephalopod research was Eric Hochberg at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. I think I was seventeen when he welcomed me into the museum's secret catacombs (at least, that's how I thought of them) of preserved specimens. Awe washed over me as I stared at shelves ...

More than 150 years ago, immigrant Chinese fishermen launched sampans into the chilly waters of Monterey Bay to capture squid. The Bay also lured fishermen from Sicily and other Mediterranean countries, who brought round-haul nets to fish for sardines. This was the beginning of the largest fishery ...

Understanding neurons - their shape, patterns of electrical activity even a profile of which genes are turned on at a given moment - remains as much art as science due to the complexity of research.But that could soon change: Researchers at MIT and the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed ...

If you have ever left your porch light aglow during a late-night outing, you are probably familiar with the cloud of insect life through which you will have to pass once you get home at the end of the evening. In most places this is merely an inconvenience, but in areas where insects can carry ...

Researchers  have uncovered a new way to stimulate activity of immune cell opiate receptors, leading to efficient tumor cell clearance - their pharmacological approach can activate the immune cells to prevent cancer growth through stimulation of the opiate receptors found on immune cells.This ...

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) has announced today that its decision not to approve JEVTANA[(R)Black Triangle Drug] (cabazitaxel) for use on the NHS will be upheld, following an appeal from Sanofi. This decision could effectively prevent thousands of men in the ...

Cell Therapeutics, Inc. ("CTI") today announced that it has received conditional marketing authorization from the European Commission ("EC") for Pixuvri (pixantrone) as monotherapy for the treatment of adult patients with multiply relapsed or refractory aggressive non-Hodgkin B-cell lymphomas ("NHL") ...

End-of-year academic stress getting you down? Here’s a spirit-lifting tip: Open your browser and Google “Heartland billboard.”You’ll quickly find The Heartland Institute’s latest propaganda piece: a mugshot of Ted Kaczynski next to the words, “I still believe in Global Warming. Do you ...

Men are generally more reluctant to try vegetarian products and a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research says that is influenced by a strong association of meat with masculinity. "We examined whether people in Western cultures have a metaphoric link between meat and men" write the authors ...

Around election season, in whatever country you are in (assuming you have elections) you can tell True Believers in their earnest politics truly wish the other side could be labeled as having defective brains and genetics and therefore be cured - or at least sterilized. It's not to be; genes ...

Females like the bad boys when they are young, we all know that colloquially - and even more so when they are ovulating, say a group of social and evolutionary psychologists.It's social psychology and a professor of marketing is as qualified to look at survey results as anyone so let's go with ...

Perhaps it was the title: ‘Acquired preferences for piquant foods by chimpanzees.’ but whatever the reason, Paul Rozin, Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, found it very difficult to get his research paper published. The work had been inspired by observations the professor ...

The University of Luxembourg has agreed to actively participate in the Open Access initiative.  Defined in the Budapest (2002), Bethesda (2003) and Berlin (2003) declarations on Open Access, it is an effort to make scholarly publications freely available to the public - because the content ...

Athletes sometimes 'choke' - succumb to pressure and underperform - in key situations. How can an athlete be among the top 1,000 participants in the world at a task and be paralyzed by situations in a game they play with expertise?Choking happens to lots of people.  We've all heard people ...

The word 'Shirk' normally carries quite pronounced negative connotations. But are there circumstances when shirking might have beneficial effects? For example in the efficient operation of teams?Shirk : verb ‘To avoid work, duties or responsibilities, especially if they are difficult or unpleasant ...