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Though the largest telescopes are controlled by governments, a large part of the time new discoveries are made by amateur astronomers. "Amateur" is a negative word now but at the turn of the 20th century it wasn't. Sherlock Holmes was an amateur detective because he did not have to do it as a job, he was not a blue collar laborer the way the police force was regarded in the 1800s, he was more educated in detective work by not having that occupation and that is why he was better.While you won't see a lot of fruit fly studies done by amateurs, in other fields citizen science provides a lot of data, and a new paper argues they should be treated as co-authors in journal articles.

“The history of the bow and arrow is the history of mankind,” said Fred Bear.If you want to get a fresh turkey for Thanksgiving, you don't need to spend $120 for something that calls itself Heritage, you can honor your actual heritage and go get one the way your ancestors did. With a bow and arrow.Since that time, a lot of has improved about archery. Though guns haven't changed much in the last 100 years, archery has gone through a technological renaissance. Entire science conference presentations are devoted to it, and that happened this weekend at the annual meeting of the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics in Seattle. Credit: INSEP, France.

"Many people have dogs. We have stem cells," says Cedars-Sinai Hospital lab manager Loren Ornelas-Menendez about why they will be working on Thanksgiving, hand-feeding a special formula to their charges and making sure they stay at just the right temperature. Like they do every day, 365 days a year.This is not just any lab, it houses stem cells derived from hundreds of healthy donors and patients, and a catalog of human ills, including diabetes, breast cancer, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and Crohn's disease.

Many people feel anxious about the prospect of their death. Indeed, some philosophers have argued that death anxiety is universal and that this anxiety bounds and organizes human existence. But do we also suffer from birth anxiety? Perhaps. After all, we are all beings that are born as well as beings that die.Whereas philosophers have said a lot about our anxiety about death, they have said little about birth anxiety. This is part-and-parcel of the broader neglect of birth in the Western philosophical tradition. The guiding thought has been that ‘all men are mortal’ (‘men’ in the sense of ‘human beings’) rather than ‘all human beings are mortal and natal’.

While they last, gamma-ray bursts outshine stars and even galactic quasars. They are the most energetic phenomenon known to humankind, resulting from the formation of neutron stars or black holes as dying stars collapse. They are triggered by outflows of plasma ejected near the speed of light. They usually display energies in the region of tens of giga-electron-volts but why not even greater? Indeed, it is no longer speculation, a gamma-ray burst in the region of a tera-electron-volt has been detected. Which means these energies might actually be common.

The evolution of the snake body has captivated researchers for a long time because it represents one of the most dramatic examples of the vertebrate body's ability to adapt. A limited fossil record has obscured our understanding of their early evolution but now an ancient legged snake, called Najash has shed light on the origin of the slithering reptiles.The fossil analyses reveal they possessed hind legs during the first 70 million years of their evolution, and provide details about how the flexible skull of snakes evolved from their lizard ancestors.Scientists performed high-resolution (CT) scanning and light microscopy of preserved skulls of Najash to reveal substantial new anatomical data on the early evolution of snakes.

Before Chomsky, there was Lippmann: the First World War and ‘manufactured consent.’While the ‘manufacture of consent’ is an idea now mostly associated with Noam Chomsky, the phrase was actually coined by the US journalist and writer Walter Lippman in his influential book "Public Opinion" (1922) – a fact that Chomsky and Edward Herman, his co-author on "Manufacturing Consent" (1988), readily acknowledge. Lippman contended that, because the world is too complex for any individual to comprehend, a strong society needs people and institutions specialized in collecting data and creating the most accurate interpretations of reality possible.

Though homosexual behavior has been rewarded in over 1,000 organisms, it can be an evolutionary puzzle; since reproduction can't happen, there is a fitness cost, so why do it?

During mating season in the summer, little brown bat (Myotis lucifugus) females huddle their small, furry bodies together to save thermal energy. These "maternity colonies" are important but with population losses across North America, summer access to an attic or other permanent sheltered structure, as opposed to just trees or rock crevices, could be a huge benefit.In a new Ecosphere paper, researchers investigate and describe the conservation importance of buildings relative to natural, alternative roosts for little brown bats  in Yellowstone National Park.

For two-thirds of parents it can be hard to know the line between recognizing youth depression and making something special of teen moods, and perhaps enabling more problems.But there is no question America is the most over-medicated in the world, and one the most anti-depressants, and therefore it is little surprising that 25 percent of parents say their child knows a teen with clinical depression while 1 in 10 believe a peer of their child has committed suicide. Obviously that can’t be true, even if the age is pushed out to 24 there are only 6,000 suicides per year, while there are 60,000,000 kids in school from ages 6-22.

Myopia (nearsightedness) is the most frequent cause of correctable visual impairment worldwide.  It occurs when the eye grows too long from front to back (axial length). Instead of focusing images on the retina, images are focused at a point in front of the retina. As a result, people with myopia have good near vision, but poor distance vision that can be corrected with glasses or contact lenses. Now kids 8-12 have a new option that has been show to slow the progression of myopia at the initiation of treatment.

Communist dictatorships lack transparency, so if they don't want to be bound by the same ethical rules as everyone else, they won't be. Some in western countries gush about claims they make regarding solar power, for example, but only their CO2 emissions - highest in the world - can be verified from outside. It turns out their voluntary organ donation claims may be just as made up, and that is because the Chinese government is systematically misreporting data, according to new research.A history of fraud and unethical behavior