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Some metaphors are difficult to explain - if you have a child and use one and get asked what it means, and then get asked what the definition means, you know what we...mean...see how hard it can be to communicate?They're even more difficult in sign language and a recent study on the use of metaphors in spoken language and various sign languages looks into the issue.  The recent paper by Irit Meir of the University of Haifa examines the interrelations between two notions that play an important role in language and communication, iconicity and metaphor.

Colors are not constant, they are relative and relatively speaking, bees see much differently than we do.Researchers at Queen Mary, University of London and Imperial College London have developed what they call FReD – the Floral Reflectance Database – that holds data on what colors flowers appear to be, to bees.    Records of flower colors don't take the visual systems of pollinator insects into account and bees have evolved completely different color detection mechanisms from humans so they see colors outside our own capabilities in the ultra-violet range.

It sounds like a tough choice but a new strategy to prevent asthma may be going back to the way our parents did things - less super-hygiene and more viruses.   A new study reports that influenza virus infection in young mice protected the mice as adults against the development of allergic asthma. The same protective effect was achieved by treating young mice with compound isolated from the bacterium Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori), a bacterium that colonizes the stomach and is best known for causing ulcers and increasing the risk of gastric cancers. 

While the average lifespan of those who reach adulthood has continued to rise those years spent living without health issues have not kept pace.From 1970 to 2005, the probability of a 65-year-old surviving to age 85 doubled, from about a 20 percent chance to a 40 percent chance and the presumption was that the same changes allowing people to live longer, including medical advances, would delay the onset of disease and allow people to spend fewer years of their lives with debilitating illness.Instead, a 20-year-old today can expect to live one less healthy year over his or her life span than a 20-year-old a decade ago.What gives?

The Bering Sea, northward extension of the Pacific Ocean between Siberia and Alaska, was ice-free and full of life during the last major warm period, a new study has shown.

The mechanisms are used by plants when they extract water from very dry or inhospitable land could provide insight into how to do the same thing more efficiently for people. "In the case of mangrove swamps, for example, the plants are able to extract freshwater from a saltwater environment, despite the fact that the osmotic pressure should make quite the opposite happen," says Professor José Luis Pérez Díaz, who studies this type of relatively unknown phenomenon as part of a new line of research that the Department of Mechanical Engineering at  Carlos III University of Madrid has begun.

If you have read any science fiction, you know what a railgun is; instead of using a projectile hurled by an explosion, the idea is to use an electomagnetic current to accelerate a non-explosive bullet at several times the speed of sound. The conductive bullet or artillery moves along electrically charged parallel rails out of the barrel at speeds as high as Mach 7. The result: a weapon that can hit a target 100 miles or more away within minutes, seven times as far as current ship-mounted guns.

The atmosphere is a complex system and therefore the exact amount of warming due to greenhouse gases is the subject of scientific debate but it is proven science that clouds amplify the warming effect and a new model provides more insight into specifics, though some prominent climate skeptics have recently been arguing that clouds would act to stabilize the climate, thereby preventing greenhouse gases from causing significant warming.

Most are unaware of it but the evolutionary arms race between plants and plant diseases is always happening around us.  Fungi are a major cause of plant diseases and are responsible for large-scale harvest failure in crops like maize and other cereals all over the world.   Researchers analyzed the genetic make-up of Sporisorium reilianum, an important maize parasite. Based on a comparison with the genome of a related fungal species, they succeeded in identifying new genes in maize infestation. 

Everyone has heard of "Fahrenheit 451", the classic novel where big government gets its agenda by increasingly taking away rights in order to mandate fairness. This article has nothing to do with that.   Instead, it is about measurement of the viscosity of a gas at a few billionths of a degree Kelvin, or -459 degrees Fahrenheit.    Researchers have used lasers to contain ultra-chilled atoms and measured the viscosity or stickiness of a gas often considered to be the sixth state of matter. The measurements verify that this gas can be used as a "scale model" of exotic matter, such as super-high temperature superconductors, the nuclear matter of neutron stars, and even the state of matter created microseconds after the Big Bang.

"My two dads" is no longer just a lousy TV show.  Using induced pluripotent stem cell technology (controversy-free!) scientists have produced male and female mice from two fathers.It isn't part of any cultural agenda, the intent was to preserve endangered species, but obviously it opens up the possibility of same-sex couples having their own genetic children.  The authors caution that the "generation of human iPS cells still requires significant refinements prior to their use for therapeutic purposes."

The race is on to replace lithium-ion batteries and Rice University research may put nickel-tin nanowires in the hunt.The vertical arrays of nickel-tin nanowires are encased in PMMA, the polymer best known as Plexiglas.  The Rice laboratory of Pulickel Ajayan found a way to reliably coat single nanowires with a smooth layer of a PMMA-based gel electrolyte that insulates the wires from the counter electrode while allowing ions to pass through. "In a battery, you have two electrodes separated by a thick barrier," said Ajayan, professor in mechanical engineering and materials science and of chemistry. "The challenge is to bring everything into close proximity so this electrochemistry becomes much more efficient."