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A new report, co-authored by a University of Hertfordshire academic, which will be launched this Thursday (22 January), has revealed that girls are more likely to have new technologies at home than boys and it is mothers rather than fathers who assist them.The Learning in the Family report which looked at how families are involved in children’s learning, was funded by Becta, commissioned by Intuitive Media Research Services and co-authored by Robert Hart of Intuitive Media and Professor Karen Pine, at the University’s School of Psychology. They conducted two online surveys with a sample of 4,606 children aged six to fourteen, going into more depth with a further 2,535 children and then interviewed twelve families.

It has been difficult to prove that fast-swimming sperms have an advantage when it comes to fertilizing an egg but a research team at Uppsala University say that unfaithful females of the cichlid fish species do influence the males’ sperms - increased competition leads to both faster and larger sperms, and the research findings published in PNAS say that the much mythologized size factor does indeed count.The findings also show that the speed and the size of sperms are closely related: larger sperms are faster. These sperms swim faster thanks to the greater power of a larger flagellum, but faster sperms also need to have a larger store of energy, which in turn results in larger sperms.

In terms of diversity and sheer numbers, the microbes occupying the human gut easily dwarf the billions of people inhabiting the Earth. Numbering in the tens of trillions and representing many thousands of distinct genetic families, this microbiome, as it's called, helps the body perform a variety of regulatory and digestive functions, many still poorly understood. How this microbial mélange may be linked to body weight changes associated with morbid obesity is a relevant and important clinical question that has received recent attention. Now, a new study suggests that the composition of microbes within the gut may hold a key to one cause of obesity—and the prospect of future treatment.

The cast of "House" won't need to find new jobs any time soon but using a robotic assistant to remove a patient's gallbladder by key-hole surgery (laparoscopic cholecystectomy) was as safe as working with a human assistant, a Cochrane Review has concluded. Comparisons between robot- and human-assisted surgery showed that there were no differences in terms of morbidity, the need to switch to open surgery, total operating time, or length of stay in hospital.

It's not quite a "Book of the Dead" but a 14th century brick oven uncovered by archaeologists in Spain found a unique  use for animal bones just the same - strengthening city fortifications.   The scientists report that the animal bones were burnt in the oven and mixed with other materials to produce a protective coating that strengthened the grand medieval walls of what is today Granada, Spain.  It must have worked pretty well since Granada and the surrounding territory were the last bastion of Islamic Iberia during that period.In a study scheduled to appear in the Jan. 15 issue of Analytical Chemistry, scientists describe how they found these materials thanks to their new testing method.

In the first-ever study of food advertisements in UK magazines, researchers found them filled with sugary, salt-filled options often contradicting the health messages the articles were trying to put across.  That means that women sitting down to enjoy some reading with their cup of tea and a chocolate bar may be tempted to an even unhealthier diet. Newcastle University researchers collected and compared data on the nutritional content of the foods advertised in 30 most widely-read weekly magazines during November 2007. A detailed nutritional analysis of the foods in the adverts found that the products advertised were generally much higher in sugar and salt, and lower in fiber than the World Health Organisation (WHO) recommendations.

Peter Doran, Associate Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, wasn't all that happy that his Nature paper(1) was widely used  by detractors of early 2000s global warming theory so he set out recently to find out just how many other earth scientists believe in human-induced climate change.His research then found that some parts of Antarctica had cooled between 1986 and 2000 so he was lumped in with those disputing global warming, something he did not say.   Doran found out, just as Bill Gray later would when he disputed Al Gore's contention that global warming caused Hurricane Katrina, when you go up against crazy people with an agenda life can get ugly.

NGC 253 is one of the brightest and dustiest spiral galaxies in the sky but we are always learning new things about it.   Astronomers using the Very Large Telescope's (VLT) near-infrared eye called NACO, an adaptive optics instrument, are now saying that the  center of NGC 253 hosts a scaled-up version of Sagittarius A*, the bright radio source that lies at the core of the Milky Way, and which we know harbors a massive black hole."We have thus discovered what could be a twin of our Galaxy's Centre," says co-author Almudena Prieto, part of the group of astronomers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (Spain) and lead author of a new paper on the topic, which also disclosed a  group of new young, massive and dusty stellar nurseries there.

A review article published in the European journal Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics says there is a relationship between depression and bone metabolism.The study says that the association between psychiatric illness, in particular depression, and osteoporosis has been the subject of a growing body of research yielding various findings, although most identify some effect on bone. In addition to medication-related processes and/or modifiable lifestyle factors associated with mood disturbances, endocrine and immune alteration secondary to depression may play a pathogenetic role in bone metabolism.

Scientists who study how human chemistry can permanently turn off genes have typically focused on small islands of DNA believed to contain most of the chemical alterations involved in those switches. But after an epic tour of so-called DNA methylation sites across the human genome in normal and cancer cells, Johns Hopkins scientists have found that the vast majority of the sites aren’t grouped in those islands at all, but on nearby regions that they’ve named “shores.” 

Even 150 years after Charles Darwin’s epochal On the Origin of Species many questions about the molecular basis of evolution are still waiting for answers.How are signaling pathways changed by genes and by the environment enabling the development of new species? A group of scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, Germany, are striving to decode the molecular basis of parasitism and their objects of research are nematode worms. Do the dauer stages which occur in certain nematodes and the infective larvae of their parasitic cousins share a common evolutionary basis?

Transiting exoplanets are routinely detected when they pass in front of their parent star as viewed from the Earth, which only happens by chance. The transit event causes a small drop in the observed starlight, which can then be detected.