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Geobacter can clean up uranium but a new study documenting how microbes generate electricity while cleaning up nuclear waste and other toxic metals could mean a big benefit for contaminated sites in the future.Identifying the Geobacters' conductive pili (nanowires - hair-like appendages found on the outside of Geobacters) as doing the bulk of the work is a new revelation. The nanowires also shield Geobacter and allow the bacteria to thrive in a toxic environment.

In 2009,  UK drugs advisor Dr. David Nutt was relieved of his duties due to controversial views on the harmfulness of different drugs and the lack of evidence behind current drug policy.Various claims were that this was politically motivated and concern was that scholarly research such as Nutt's should not be subject to political attack.Agreed, but a new article in Addiction says the attack was justified because Nutt's work on the harmfulness of drugs is scientifically flawed.

Almost half of recreational runners drink too much fluid during races, showing many athletes hold unscientific views regarding the benefits of different hydration practices .Expert guidelines recommend runners drink only when thirsty but a recent Loyola survey found that 36.5 percent of runners drink according to a preset schedule or to maintain a certain body weight and 8.9 percent drink as much as possible.

Some cultural activists like Hollywood director Rob Reiner believe smoking is so influential it should be the target of modern-day McCarthyism and banned from films and television. What about sexualized lyrics in popular music?  Do those have an impact on the sexual behavior and attitudes of adolescents? Researchers Cougar Hall, Joshua H. West, and Shane Hill from Brigham Young University examined the trend of increasing use of sexually explicit lyrics in music - though if they think the trend is recent, they must be fairly young; music from the 1970s was stuffed with overt references to sex.

Clouds amplify climate change, says Texas A&M University atmospheric sciences professor Andrew Dessler, rebutting recent claims by some that clouds are a root cause of climate change (for an analysis of the study that led to the concern, go here).Dessler says decades of data support the mainstream and long-held view that clouds are primarily acting as a so-called feedback that amplifies warming from human activity.

Postpartum pain management using the opioid codeine has been common and, until recently, it was considered safe to breastfeed - the death of an infant exposed to codeine through breast milk led health care providers to question the safety of the drug when used by breastfeeding mothers. Instead, some doctors have began prescribing oxycodone as an alternative to codeine but an upcoming study in The Journal of Pediatrics finds that oxycodone is no safer for breastfed infants than codeine.

Around 27 million Americans have arthritis, three million of which began with a joint injury that provokes slow and steady cartilage deterioration.A new study from MIT suggests that glucocorticoid dexamethasone, a steroid drug currently used to treat inflammatory diseases, could also prevent osteoarthritis from ever developing in those people if given soon after the injury.

Feel lazy?  Maybe you can blame your genes.Specially-bred mice which had two genes removed, which control the protein AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK), an enzyme that is switched on when you exercise, didn't want to run a ny more."Mice love to run," said Gregory Steinberg, associate professor of medicine in the Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine at McMaster University.  "While the normal mice could run for miles, those without the genes in their muscle could only run the same distance as down the hall and back. It was remarkable. The mice looked identical to their brothers or sisters but within seconds we knew which ones had the genes and which one didn't." 

People communicate in bursts. In communication, our behavior does not happen in a homogenous way over time, but rather there is universal behavior in which there is no communication, followed by short intervals, says a new study.A new study analyzed around 9,000 million calls throughout a nearly one year period and identified  features of the communication process and attempted to quantify their impact in the diffusion of information.  

Everyone agrees what the LHC needs is more art.Okay, no one actually thinks that.  What the LHC needs is to find a Higgs boson or a whole bunch of Europeans outside physics are going to be annoyed they spent $10 billion to find the "God particle" and will now be told 'we advanced science by not finding it'.   Most people don't think in terms of negatives, they think in terms of positives, so in a bad economy the political questions will be 'why did we spend billions of Euros to confirm the non-existence of something a lot of physicists didn't think existed anyway?'

The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), a free, online collaborative tool, is expanded in its second edition released today, offering information on more than one-third of all known species on Earth.EOLv2  has 20 times as many pages as when the EOL.org first launched in 2008 - 700,000 today. The global partnership of 170 content providers behind EOL.org wants to build a site with 1.9 million pages, one for every species known to science. 

Breast-feeding mothers are far more likely to demonstrate a 'mama bear' effect', aggressively protecting their infants and themselves , than women who bottle-feed their babies or who are non-mothers, says a new study in Psychological Science.To help mama bear out, breast-feeding mothers register lower blood pressure than other women when behaving aggressively - the researchers say suggests breast-feeding helps dampen the body’s stress response to fear; breast-feeding mothers are more likely to be courageous.