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"In 2002," write Zalasiewicz and colleagues, "Paul Crutzen, the Nobel Prize-winning chemist, suggested that we had left the Holocene and had entered a new epoch - the Anthropocene - because of the global environmental effects of increased human population and economic development."
The authors document a radical yet compelling case for the idea that the appearance of humans has so physically changed Earth that there is no organic justification for linking pre- and post-industrialized Earth within the same epoch (the Holocene).
They state that the global environmental change since the start of the Industrial Revolution Earth has been sufficient to leave a 'global stratigraphic signature' distinct from that of the Holocen

HIV and AIDS are huge threats to human health. Each day in 2005 around 7,600 people died from HIV-related causes and a further 38.6 million people were living with the disease. Two million of these were living in the high-income countries of North America and Western and Central Europe. Estimates suggest that that year 4.1 million people contracted the virus.
Estimates also suggest that 70% of HIV-infected people stay sexually active, with a substantial proportion continuing to participate in unprotected sex.

All materials, from paper to water, reflect some amount of light. Scientists have long envisioned an ideal black material that absorbs all the colors of light while reflecting none. So far they have been unsuccessful in engineering a material with a total reflectance of zero but each advancement eventually boosts the effectiveness and efficiency of solar energy conversion, infrared sensors and other devices.
The total reflectance of conventional black paint is between 5 and 10 percent.

The 1000 Genomes Project, announced today, will involve sequencing the genomes of at least a thousand people from around the world.
Drawing on the expertise of multidisciplinary research teams, the 1000 Genomes Project will develop a new map of the human genome that will provide a view of biomedically relevant DNA variations at a resolution unmatched by current resources.
As with other major human genome reference projects, data from the 1000 Genomes Project will be made swiftly available to the worldwide scientific community through freely accessible public databases.
Any two humans are more than 99 percent the same at the genetic level.

A good fight with your spouse may be good for your health, research suggests.
Couples in which both the husband and wife suppress their anger when one attacks the other die earlier than members of couples where one or both partners express their anger and resolve the conflict, according to preliminary results of a University of Michigan study.
Researchers looked at 192 couples over 17 years and placed the couples into one of four categories: both partners communicate their anger; in the second and third groups one spouse expresses while the other suppresses; and both the husband and wife suppress their anger and brood, said Ernest Harburg, professor emeritus with the U-M School of Public Health and the Psychology Department, and lead author.

Tissue damage triggers an inflammatory response by white cells to protect skin from infection by killing microbes. The same white cells guide the production of layers of collagen. These layers of collagen help the wound heal but they stand out from the surrounding skin and result in scarring.
New research from the University of Bristol shows that by suppressing one of the genes that normally switches on in wound cells, wounds can heal faster and reduce scarring. This has major implications not just for wound victims but also for people who suffer organ tissue damage through illness or abdominal surgery.
When skin is damaged a blood clot forms and cells underneath the wound start to repair the damage, leading to scarring. Scarring is a natural part of tissue repair and is most obvious where skin has healed after a cut or burn. It ranges from trivial (a grazed knee) to chronic (diabetic leg ulcers) and is not limited to the skin.

The stereotype that couples in same-sex relationships are not as committed as their heterosexual counterparts and are therefore not as psychologically healthy is disputed by two studies featured in the January issue of Developmental Psychology.
Results showed that same-sex relationships were similar to those of opposite-sex couples in many ways. All had positive views of their relationships but those in the more committed relationships (gay and straight) resolved conflict better than the heterosexual dating couples.

A new study published in CANCER found that cigarette smoking and alcohol consumption do increase ovarian cancer risk while caffeine may lower the risk, particularly in women not using hormones.
Various studies have assessed the potential link between modifiable factors such as smoking or caffeine and alcohol intake and have generated conflicting results. To help clarify these associations, Dr. Shelley S. Tworoger, of Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health, and colleagues examined ongoing questionnaire data from the Brigham and Women’s Hospital-based Nurses’ Health Study, which includes 121,701 US female registered nurses. The Nurses’ Health Study cohort was established in 1976, when women aged 30-35 completed and returned initial questionnaires.

The World Wide Web offered a way to use computers to bring people together but the ".com" era turned it into a cash machine and it became a way to do advertising and push information out to people. Web 2.0 took that back with user-generated content and social communities that gave birth to YouTube, Facebook and ScientificBlogging.com.
Could the foundation of Web 3.0 be something as minor as user-generated networks?
WIP is a project in Europe funded by the EC and in partnership with companies like Siemens. It is basically an all-wireless mobile internet architecture using cross-layer design, transparent mobility and, most importantly to the creators, self-organization.
“When the internet first emerged, it assumed devices would be fixed in place and linked by wires,” remarks Marcelo Dias de Amorim, a researcher with the WIP project. “But that’s no longer true. A large number of devices are mobile and equipped with wireless communication capabilities.”
A number of the architecture aspects in the WWW were created to solve discreet problems that arose as time went on and popularity grew. WIP wants to reinventing the internet and its underlying methods with new technology.
But will people want it?

If you want to know how the Oscar celebrations will stack up, our very own Garth Sundem wrote the definitive Oscartronic equation last year. Bonus: Oscar fashion by the numbers is here as well.
But what if you just want to figure out who will get a nomination? You'll have to settle for Harvard and UCLA then.

The environmental damage caused by rich nations disproportionately impacts poor nations and costs them more than their combined foreign debt, according to a first-ever global accounting of the dollar costs of countries' ecological footprints.
The study, led by former University of California, Berkeley, research fellow Thara Srinivasan, assessed the impacts of agricultural intensification and expansion, deforestation, overfishing, loss of mangrove swamps and forests, ozone depletion and climate change during a 40-year period, from 1961 to 2000.

Community-associated methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (CA-MRSA) infections are caused primarily by a single strain—USA300—of an evolving bacterium that has spread with “extraordinary transmissibility” throughout the United States during the past five years, according to a new study led by National Institutes of Health (NIH) scientists.
CA-MRSA, an emerging public health concern, typically causes readily treatable soft-tissue infections such as boils, but also can lead to life-threatening conditions that are difficult to treat.
The study, from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) of NIH, resolves debate about the molecular evolution of CA-MRSA in the United States.