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Animal Free Will? Their Personalities Are Unpredictable, Just Like Ours

Animal Free Will? Their Personalities Are Unpredictable, Just Like Ours

A new paper says that unpredictability is a consistent trait in the animal world, just like it is humans.
Anyone who owns a cat knows that, right?
Not really. Though animals are known to show consistent individual differences in behavior, and pet owners may refer to it as them displaying 'personality', a new paper refutes prior beliefs and says that some individual animals, just like humans, are consistently more unpredictable than others over time.
Unpredictability is a known and accepted aspect of human behavior much like we've always viewed predictable aspects of personality. However, until now it has never been studied in animals, the authors say.

Horseshoe Bats In China Confirmed As SARS Origin

Horseshoe Bats In China Confirmed As SARS Origin

A team of international scientists has isolated a very close relative of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) from horseshoe bats in China, confirming them as the origin of the virus responsible for the 2002-3 pandemi, which killed 774 people of the 8094 people infected and led to diagnosed cases across the world, impacting international travel and trade.

Staggering Wind Turbines Could Improve Performance 33 Percent, Says Numerical Model

Staggering Wind Turbines Could Improve Performance 33 Percent, Says Numerical Model

Wind farms can be part of our future energy mix assuming the cost of offshore turbine energy versus their efficiency can be made manageable. A new computer projection found a better way to arrange the turbines is a step in the right direction. A team from the University of Delaware found that staggering and spacing out turbines in an offshore wind farm can improve performance by as much as 33 percent. 

Do Stress Eaters  Eat Less When Times Are Good?

Do Stress Eaters Eat Less When Times Are Good?

A team of psychologists have determined that stress eating is more of a yo-yo than a simple pattern; they say stress eaters show a dynamic pattern of eating behavior that could have benefits in non-stressful situations. 

Babies Learn Songs In The Womb

Babies Learn Songs In The Womb

A brain imaging study says that babies can learn lullabies while still in utero.
The paper focused on 24 women during the final trimester of their pregnancies. Half of the women played the melody of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star to their babies five days a week for the final stages of their pregnancies. 
The brains of the babies who heard the melody while in the womb reacted more strongly to the familiar melody both immediately and four months after birth when compared with the control group. The authors conclude that fetuses can recognize and remember sounds from the outside world well before they are born.  

SORT-OUT VI Trial Results

SORT-OUT VI Trial Results

Both drug-eluting stents (DES) with biocompatible polymers and DES with biodegradable polymers were associated with low major adverse coronary events, demonstrating the non-inferiority of the biocompatible polymer stents in patients undergoing percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI).
The findings of the SORT-OUT VI trial were presented today at the 25th annual Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics (TCT) scientific symposium. Sponsored by the Cardiovascular Research Foundation (CRF), TCT is the world's premier educational meeting specializing in interventional cardiovascular medicine.

Non-Toxic Drug Silences Incurable Brain Cancer Gene

Non-Toxic Drug Silences Incurable Brain Cancer Gene

Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is a brain cancer that kills approximately 13,000 Americans a year. It is aggressive and incurable.
A research team has demonstrated delivery of a therapeutic delivered using nanotechnology that turns off a critical gene in this complex cancer, increasing survival rates significantly - in animals.
The drug is designed to target a specific cancer-causing gene in cells. The drug simply flips the switch of the troublesome oncogene to "off," silencing the gene, which knocks out the proteins that keep cancer cells immortal. 

Doomed World Kepler-78b Delights Astronomers

Doomed World Kepler-78b Delights Astronomers

Kepler-78b is a planet that shouldn't exist because the blazing hot lava world circles its star every 8.5 hours at a distance of less than one million miles - one of the tightest known orbits. According to current beliefs about planet formation, it couldn't have formed so close to its star, nor could it have moved there.
Kepler-78b a mystery world. And it is doomed. 

Kepler-78b: Just Like Earth, Except 2,000 Degrees Hotter

Kepler-78b: Just Like Earth, Except 2,000 Degrees Hotter

A newly discovered planet, Kepler-78b, is in the constellation of Cygnus but it's a lot like Earth. If Earth were 2,000 degrees hotter and orbited the sun every 8 hours. But otherwise it is a lot like our planet, about 20% larger and 169% of our mass, and that makes it the smallest exoplanet to-date that has a confirmed mass and radius. The size is about the same, the density is about the same - and that's part of the mystery. How did it form so close to its star?

Sun Emits Fourth X-class Solar Flare In The Last Week

Sun Emits Fourth X-class Solar Flare In The Last Week

The sun emitted another significant solar flare, peaking at 5:54 p.m. on Oct. 29th, 2013  – the fourth X-class flare in the last week.
Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation and while the radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth's atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground, when intense enough they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel. The disruption to radio signals occurs for as long as the flare is ongoing, anywhere from minutes to hours.
This flare is classified as an X2.3 class flare. "X-class" denotes the most intense flares, while the number provides more information about its strength. An X2 is twice as intense as an X1, an X3 is three times as intense, etc.

Evolutionary Cascade Theory Humor: A Sauropod Walks Into A Bar, The Bartender Asks 'Why The Long Neck?'

Evolutionary Cascade Theory Humor: A Sauropod Walks Into A Bar, The Bartender Asks 'Why The Long Neck?'

A new collection featuring research on the complex evolutionary cascade theory that made the unique gigantism of sauropod dinosaurs possible has now been published in PLOS ONE.
Sauropod dinosaurs were the largest terrestrial animals to roam the Earth, exceeding all other land-dwelling vertebrates in both mean and maximal body size. While convergently evolving many features seen in large terrestrial mammals, such as upright, columnar limbs and barrel-shaped trunks, sauropods evolved some unique features, such as the extremely long necks and diminutive heads they are famous for.

WIMP Watch: LUX Dark Matter Detector Sends First Data

WIMP Watch: LUX Dark Matter Detector Sends First Data

The Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment is trying to identify the nature of dark matter, an invisible substance that physicists believe is all around us, making up most of the matter in the universe, even though it has effect on our lives.
The umbrella term 'dark matter' encompasses about 25% of the Universe, while what we know as matter makes up about 5%. The rest consists of what is called "dark energy" and no one knows anything about that other than that it is something helps make gravity behave strangely at the very large scale.