A federal law requiring publicly traded firms to disclose whether they have adopted codes of ethics for their senior financial officers may be useful, but a Penn State researcher says its impact is often limited.

A firm's board of directors needs to be the driving force behind creating and implementing the program in most cases for it to truly be successful.

"According to my research, firms with ethics programs overseen by their boards of directors disclose more credible financial information—as perceived by financial analysts—than do firms having ethics programs not overseen by their boards, and firms not having ethics programs," said Andrew Felo, assistant professor of accounting at Penn State Great Valley graduate school in suburban Philadelphia.

I saw a press release about a global warming 'virtual march'( we'll get back to that ) and a tour being conducted by Laurie David ( married to "Seinfeld" co-creator Larry David and thus an expert on climate science, also founder of the website that put out the press release ) and Sheryl Crow called the "Stop Global Warming College Tour" beginning April 9th in Dallas.

I was itching to find more information about it and, other than discovering they were going to show clips from Al Gore's movie ( yeah, no college student will have seen that ) and Sheryl Crow would sing a few songs at each stop, the only interesting thing I came across was an article in something called the

One of the very first posts I made on a  blog over a year ago was “Praise the Lord, not Petroleum”.  It discussed the very public and high profile actions a significant number of Evangelical Christian organizations were taking to fight global warming.  Their underlying argument is simple: if the Earth, and all living things are god’s creation, we should not destroy it and them with global warming.

Using a systems biological analysis of genome-scale data from the model plant Arabidopsis, an international team of researchers identified that the master gene controlling the biological clock is sensitive to nutrient status.

This hypothesis derived from multi-network analysis of Arabidopsis genomic data, and validated experimentally, has shed light on how nutrients affect the molecular networks controlling plant growth and development in response to nutrient sensing.

Scientists have used the world's largest robotic telescope to make the earliest-ever measurement of the optical polarisation* of a Gamma Ray Burst (GRB) just 203 seconds after the start of the cosmic explosion. This finding, which provides new insight into GRB physics, is published in Science today (15th March 2007).

The scientists from Liverpool John Moores University and colleagues in the UK, Italy, France and Slovenia used the Liverpool Telescope on the island of La Palma and its novel new polarimeter, RINGO, to perform the measurement following detection of the burst by NASA's Swift satellite.

Over a span of two decades, warming temperatures have caused annual losses of roughly $5 billion for major food crops, according to a new study by researchers at the Carnegie Institution and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

From 1981-2002, warming reduced the combined production of wheat, corn, and barley—cereal grains that form the foundation of much of the world’s diet—by 40 million metric tons per year.

Humans acquire fears using similar neural processes whether they’ve personally experienced an aversive event or only witnessed it, according to a study by researchers at New York University’s Departments of Psychology. This is the first study examining the brain basis of fears acquired indirectly, through the observation of others. The study shows that the amygdala, which is known to be critical to the acquisition and expression of fears from personal experience, is also involved during the acquisition and expression of fears obtained indirectly through social observation. The findings appear in the most recent issue of the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (SCAN).

Sandia’s huge Z machine, which generates termperatures hottter than the sun, has turned water to ice in nanoseconds. However, don’t expect anything commercial just yet: the ice is hotter than the boiling point of water. "The three phases of water as we know them — cold ice, room temperature liquid, and hot vapor — are actually only a small part of water’s repertory of states," says Sandia researcher Daniel Dolan. "Compressing water customarily heats it. But under extreme compression, it is easier for dense water to enter its solid phase [ice] than maintain the more energetic liquid phase [water]."

Sandia is a National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) laboratory.

Over a span of two decades, warming temperatures have caused annual losses of roughly $5 billion for major food crops, according to a new study by researchers at the Carnegie Institution and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

From 1981-2002, warming reduced the combined production of wheat, corn, and barley—cereal grains that form the foundation of much of the world’s diet—by 40 million metric tons per year.

Since the beginning of the industrial age the ocean has absorbed about half of all anthropic(1) carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions into the atmosphere. This has led to an acidification of sea water. Frédéric Gazeau, a scientist at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology, and his colleagues, including Jean-Pierre Gattuso, Director of Research at the Oceanographic laboratory at Villefranche-sur-Mer (CNRS/Université Pierre et Marie Curie) have examined the reaction of oysters and mussels cultivated in Europe to this acidification of the oceans. The results, published in the review Geophysical Research Letters, are beyond doubt.