News Articles

Did Sen. Barack Obama buy the election of 2008, given that he bypassed public financing and so was able to raise and spend twice as much money as Sen. John McCain?  In 2012, the concern is the high spending by PACs but the playing field is level, both campaigns can raise and spend as much as possible this election and they will; each candidate this year will spend as much as the entire 2004 election, the last time both candidates held themselves to public financing limits.

Is your decision-making suspect?  Do you continually date strippers or bad boys who are 'getting their band together' and wish you could instead replace your own judgment with a prosthesis?Maybe one day.  Researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have created a prosthetic device which is capable of restoring decision-making due to reduced capacity due from brain disease or injury - in non-human primates, anyway.

Variation in facial shape is an easy way to explain phenotypes in humans to people who don't understand biology all that well. Monozygotic twins have almost identical faces and siblings usually have more similar faces than unrelated people, implying our facial morphology is under genetic regulation - but still little has been known about the genetic basis of normal human facial morphology. 

Here is a diet plan that requires no special meal purchases or even exercise, it just requires a willingness to believe that correlation-causation arrows fly backwards.  People, especially women, who read food labels are thinner.The results of surveys on the relationship between reading food labels and obesity indicated that the body mass index of those consumers who read the label is 1.49 points lower than those who don't read food labels when shopping for food. This translates as a reduction of almost 9 lbs. for an American woman 5 feet 3 inches tall weighing 163 lbs - already obese.

How cheaply can you build a supercomputer?  A group from the University of Southampton just made one using 64 Raspberry Pi ARM GNU/Linux boxes ($25 each) and Lego blocks. The machine, named "Iridis-Pi" after the University's Iridis supercomputer, runs off a single 13 Amp mains socket and uses MPI (Message Passing Interface) to communicate between nodes using Ethernet.The team was led by Professor Simon Cox and included Richard Boardman, Andy Everett, Steven Johnston, Gereon Kaiping, Neil O'Brien, Mark Scott and Oz Parchment.  Professor Cox's son, six-year-old James Cox, assisted with specialist support on Lego and system testing.

A set of fossil footprints in Joggins, Nova Scotia have been identified as the world’s smallest - among vertebrates to-date, anyway.The footprints were found at Joggins Fossil Cliffs. A fossil specimen of the ichnogenus Batrachichnus salamandroides was collected by local amateur paleontologist Gloria Melanson, daughter of Don Reid, the famed Keeper of the Joggins Cliffs, while walking the Joggins beach. Joggins Fossil Cliffs is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

When Western scrub jays summon others to screech over the body of a dead jay, they come a'runnin', and those 'funerals' can last for up to half an hour.But why? Western scrub jays live in breeding pairs and are not particularly social birds. “They’re really territorial and not at all friendly with other scrub-jays,”  said Teresa Iglesias, a U.C. Davis graduate student and co-author of a new study in Animal Behaviour. It turns out that death seems to signify danger, which opens up an even odder set of questions.

Researchers have discovered how to store diverse forms of artificial short-term memories - in isolated brain tissue.Memories are often grouped into two categories: declarative memory, the short and long-term storage of facts like names, places and events; and implicit memory, the type of memory used to learn a skill like playing the piano.  In the study, researchers sought to better understand the mechanisms underlying short-term declarative memories such as remembering a phone number or email address someone has just shared. 

Want to avoid a baby mama without getting surgery or enduring condoms that are too small?  Men may soon have the same choice as women when it comes to birth control.A male contraceptive pill has been talked about for decades, but so far none has been successfully created despite strong demand. Recent surveys found that about 70 percent of men would be willing to take a birth control pill if it were available.A new study says such a birth control pill for men, without side effects, may soon be ready.  Working on mice, the team found that a compound called JQ1 acts as an inhibitor to sperm production and also sperm mobility. 

The Quest project, the first carbon capture and storage (CCS) project for an oil sands operation in Canada, has gotten support from the Governments of Canada and Alberta and will soon be underway, Shell announced.

If you are flying an airplane and detect an unusual odor in a confined space 5 miles up in the air, what can it be? Burritos for lunch?   Not this time. The foul smell with traces of sulfur in the cockpit came from none other than the Grímsvötn volcano that was spewing gas and ash from southeast Iceland. Sulfur dioxide often indicates volcanic ash, and the presence of ash in the atmosphere can endanger jet engines. Once landed, Captain Klaus Sievers used data from the MetOp satellite via the Support to Aviation Control Service – SACS – to confirm that it was high-altitude sulfur dioxide.

Hurricane Isaac may have disappointed the news networks and the federal government - it was declared a state-of-emergency before the first rain drop fell and Sean Penn was not roaming the streets of New Orleans with a shotgun to prevent Republican-created zombies - but it was a good test run for some new technology; “terrestrial lidar” or “T-lidar”.