Giant planets have diverse chemistry; Jupiter, for example, first formed as a large solid core and then then accreted gas from the disk around it, which led to a different chemistry in its outer layers. When the Galileo spacecraft entered Jupiter’s atmosphere in 1995, it found the proportion ...

What do diamonds and chocolate have in common?  Well, urban legend says girls love them both.  Maybe we can add volcanoes if we are using correlational woo.A previously unrecognized volcanic process similar to one used in chocolate manufacturing is important in the dynamics of volcanic ...

Riding into a black hole is a fun mental exercise, so popular, there is a game about riding a train in a black hole and even a song by Bare Knuckles – the scientific rigor of these may be questioned.Ethan recently told us what to expect when we travel close to a black hole and then further inside ...

Your cay may soon have a new dashboard, one made of a flexible plastic and oxide layer that could be integrated into the car front window to give the driver direct informationThe MULTIFLEXIOXIDES project is designed to develop new cost-efficient, long lasting, light, flexible and transparent devices ...

ET Solar Group Corp. of China has announced completion of two ground-mounted PV power plants in Germany, with total installed capacity of over 9.6MW.The plants are ground-mounted and are 4MW and 5.6MW by size and are located in Oberröblingen, 100 kilometers west of Leipzig, and Rätzlingen, 100 ...

A cap and trade system for carbon dioxide has been a terrific flop; even proponents are leery that it is just another layer of bureaucracy and the only economic benefits have been of the economic voodoo kind, similar to a federal stimulus package that went primarily to state and municipal union ...

If enough ice from land slides into the sea, the sea level can measurably increase, in the same way that the water in a glass will rise if an ice cube is dropped into it. Because water's molecules are more closely packed in the liquid state than they are in the solid state, they can support ice's ...

Based on new fossil evidence, the age of the Rhine river is five million years older than previously believed.The famous Rhine of song and legend flows through Switzerland, Austria, Germany and the Netherlands on its way to the North Sea. The catchment area of the Rhine, around 1 ...

The anterior insular cortex is a small region of the brain, but it plays a big role in human self-awareness and in neuropsychiatric disorders. A unique cell type, the von Economo neuron (VEN), is located there.  For a long time, the VEN was assumed to be unique to humans, great apes, whales ...

Researchers writing in PNAS state they have seen an increased reaction to stress in animals whose ancestors were exposed to an environmental compound, vinclozolin, a popular fruit and vegetable fungicide, even generations earlier. The findings put a new twist on the notions of nature and nurture ...

Polar bears are evolutionarily older and genetically more distinct than believed. This largest Arctic carnivore evolved as early as 600,000 years ago, five times older than previously recognized. Polar bears are uniquely specialized for life in the arctic, given a range of morphological, physiological ...

Garra rufa - "doctor fish' - are now trendy in some fish pedicure places.  The pedicuree dips their feet (see? I don't specify a gender or make any judgments, I am not Manny Pacquiao) into water containing the fish and the little critters exfoliate you by basically eating the dead skin from ...

A team of Australian scientists has identified new genes that show identifiable changes in the blood of people with bowel cancer.The discovery has the potential to underpin a new cost-effective blood test that would signal the early stages of bowel cancer. This test could potentially save thousands ...

The 'Anesthesia Drugs Market (2011 - 2015) - U.S. Market Entry Study' analyzes and studies the U.S. market for intravenous anesthesia drugs with special focus on ketamine, distribution structure of anesthesia drugs in U.S., potential buyers, export&import system for controlled substances in U.S ...

If you have ever left your porch light aglow during a late-night outing, you are probably familiar with the cloud of insect life through which you will have to pass once you get home at the end of the evening. In most places this is merely an inconvenience, but in areas where insects can carry ...

Researchers  have uncovered a new way to stimulate activity of immune cell opiate receptors, leading to efficient tumor cell clearance - their pharmacological approach can activate the immune cells to prevent cancer growth through stimulation of the opiate receptors found on immune cells.This ...

In an attempt to evaluate the efficacy of the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA)--arguably one of North America's most crucial conservation tools--a pair of researchers from the University of Ottawa has sifted through decades of congressional reports outlining the recovery progress of threatened ...

End-of-year academic stress getting you down? Here’s a spirit-lifting tip: Open your browser and Google “Heartland billboard.”You’ll quickly find The Heartland Institute’s latest propaganda piece: a mugshot of Ted Kaczynski next to the words, “I still believe in Global Warming. Do you ...

Men are generally more reluctant to try vegetarian products and a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research says that is influenced by a strong association of meat with masculinity. "We examined whether people in Western cultures have a metaphoric link between meat and men" write the authors ...

Around election season, in whatever country you are in (assuming you have elections) you can tell True Believers in their earnest politics truly wish the other side could be labeled as having defective brains and genetics and therefore be cured - or at least sterilized. It's not to be; genes ...

“The practice of having Ph.D. graduates employed by the university that trained them, commonly called ‘academic inbreeding’ has long been suspected to be damaging to scholarly practices and achievement ” says a 2010 report in the journal Management Science.Until recently, precise details ...

YiZRi LLC has unveiled VoiceSee, the world's first hands-free, eyes-free web navigation platform that uses mobile apps to read aloud recipes, digital newspapers and Wikipedia entries for the Android smartphone.VoiceSee's flagship beta application, Culinary Pal, is a cooking web navigation mobile ...

Perhaps it was the title: ‘Acquired preferences for piquant foods by chimpanzees.’ but whatever the reason, Paul Rozin, Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, found it very difficult to get his research paper published. The work had been inspired by observations the professor ...

The University of Luxembourg has agreed to actively participate in the Open Access initiative.  Defined in the Budapest (2002), Bethesda (2003) and Berlin (2003) declarations on Open Access, it is an effort to make scholarly publications freely available to the public - because the content ...