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Should a rural, sparsely populated and predominantly white conservative state be the initial battleground for presidential nominations?
Well, someone has to go first but Steven S. Smith, the Kate M. Gregg Professor of Social Sciences Washington University in St. Louis, says it's time for Iowa to just go.
Smith says he has nothing against Iowa or New Hampshire, but he has serious misgivings about their special role as the first in the nation to select nominees. Iowa, he says, is far from representative of the nation — its population is too rural and too white to play such a critical role in choosing the nominee.

For the past 40 years, light-emitting diodes have been successfully employed wherever small amounts of light are needed. Present-day applications include car indicators, reversing and brake lights. However, the efficiency and luminosity of LEDs have never yet been sufficient to achieve a major breakthrough.
Thanks to new technologies for chip manufacturing, structural design and beam shaping developed by scientists at OSRAM Opto Semiconductors the light output of LEDs has been vastly improved. In Berlin on December 6, President Horst Köhler presented the team of OSRAM and Fraunhofer researchers with the prestigious German President’s award for technology and innovation, worth 250,000 euros, in recognition of their achievement.

Poor water supply remains a key problem in large parts of Africa and Asia.

A study carried out by researchers from the Department of Radiology and Physical Medicine of the University of Granada found that 100% of Spaniards analyzed had at least one kind of persistent organic compound (POC´s), substances internationally classified as potentially harmful to one’s health, in their bodies. These substances enter the body through food, water or even air. All of them tend to accumulate in human adipose tissue and easily enter into the organism through the aforementioned mediums.
The study, conceived by Juan Pedro Arrebola Moreno and directed by professors Piedad Martín Olmedo, Nicolás Olea Serrano and Mariana F.

A Duke University-led analysis of available records shows that while the North Atlantic Ocean’s surface waters warmed in the 50 years between 1950 and 2000, the change was not uniform. In fact, the subpolar regions cooled at the same time that subtropical and tropical waters warmed.
This striking pattern can be explained largely by the influence of a natural and cyclical wind circulation pattern called the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), wrote authors of a study published Thursday, Jan. 3, in Science Express.
Winds that power the NAO are driven by atmospheric pressure differences between areas around Iceland and the Azores.

A recent study by University of Virginia researchers demonstrates that the use of an acute, localized static magnetic field of moderate strength can result in significant reduction of swelling when applied immediately after an inflammatory injury.
Thomas Skalak, professor and chair of biomedical engineering, and Cassandra Morris, a former Ph.D. student in biomedical engineering at U.Va., reported their findings in the November 2007 edition of the American Journal of Physiology.
In the study, the hind paws of anesthetized rats were treated with inflammatory agents in order to simulate tissue injury. Magnetic therapy was then applied to the paws. The research results indicate that magnets can significantly reduce swelling if applied immediately after tissue trauma.

Scientists from Tel Aviv University recently linked depression to a biological mechanism that affects the olfactory glands. It might explain why some women, without realizing it, wear too much perfume.
Scientific research that supports this theory was published this year in the journal Arthritis and Rheumatism. “Our scientific findings suggest that women who are depressed are also losing their sense of smell, and may overcompensate by using more perfume,” explains researcher Prof. Yehuda Shoenfeld, a member of the Sackler Faculty of Medicine at Tel Aviv University. “We also believe that depression has biological roots and may be an immune system response to certain physiological cues.”
Women who are depressed are also more likely to lose weight.

Just as the risk of developing alcoholism is strongly influenced by genetic factors, mutations in gene coding – such as the aldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH2*2) allele – also appear to protect against the risk. Scientists have only just begun to apply gene-therapy techniques to the alcohol-research field. A proof-of-principle study has found that administering an anti-Aldh2 antisense gene in rodents can curtail their urge to drink.
“An ‘experiment of nature’ is observed in some individuals of East Asian origin, who are 66 to 99 percent protected against alcoholism,” explained Yedy Israel, professor of pharmacological and toxicological chemistry at the Universidad de Chile, and adjunct professor of pathology, anatomy and cell biology at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia.

Psychologists at Harvard University using neuroimaging say they have resolved the century-old debate over the existence of Extra-Sensory Perception(ESP) - and it doesn't exist.
The research was led by Samuel Moulton, a graduate student in the department of psychology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University with Stephen Kosslyn, John Lindsley Professor of Psychology at Harvard and was published in the Jan. 2008 issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. The scientists used brain scanning to test whether individuals have knowledge that cannot be explained through normal perceptual processing.
"If any ESP processes exist, then participants' brains should respond differently to ESP and non-ESP stimuli," explains Moulton.

The extinction of dinosaurs has always fascinated historians and biologists. Theories abound regarding asteroid impacts or massive volcanic flows that might have occurred around the time dinosaurs became extinct but a new book argues that the mightiest creatures the world has ever known may have been brought down by a tiny, much less dramatic force – biting, disease-carrying insects.
An important contributor to the demise of the dinosaurs, experts say, could have been the rise and evolution of insects, especially the slow-but-overwhelming threat posed by new disease carriers.

For centuries, human beings have been entranced by the captivating glimmer of the diamond. What accounts for the stunning beauty of this most precious gem?
As mathematician Toshikazu Sunada explains in an article in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, some secrets of the diamond's beauty can be uncovered by a mathematical analysis of its microscopic crystal structure. It turns out that this structure has some very special, and especially symmetric, properties. In fact, as Sunada discovered, out of an infinite universe of mathematical crystals, only one other shares these properties with the diamond, a crystal that he calls the "K_4 crystal".

Researchers at the Biodesign Institute are using bacteria as a viable option to make electricity. The next step could be commercialization of a promising microbial fuel cell (MFC) technology.
"We can use any kind of waste, such as sewage or pig manure, and the microbial fuel cell will generate electrical energy," said Marcus, a Civil and Environmental Engineering graduate student and a member of the institute's Center for Environmental Biotechnology. Unlike conventional fuel cells that rely on hydrogen gas as a fuel source, the microbial fuel cell can handle a variety of water-based organic fuels.
"There is a lot of biomass out there that we look at simply as energy stored in the wrong place," said Bruce Rittmann, director of the center.