Collectors,museums and art dealers face a lot of problems determining origin, authenticity and discovery of forgery of artwork. Experts are easily fooled - but science, not so much. They get help through the application of modern, non-destructive, "hi-tech" techniques.  Spectroscopy is a ...

There’s a popular YouTube video featuring mathematician Edward Frenkel where he describes how the NSA hacked our emails. It is a backdoor into the National Institute of Standards and Technology public key encryption standards. I’ll borrow an analogy for a simplified description of how public ...

A vast belt of carbon monoxide located at the fringes of the Beta Pictoris system is concentrated in a single clump located about 8 billion miles from the star, or nearly three times the distance between the planet Neptune and our sun. The total amount of CO observed exceeds 200 million billion ...

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a never-before-seen break-up of an asteroid,  P/2013 R3, which has fragmented into as many as ten smaller pieces. Although fragile comet nuclei have been seen to fall apart as they approach the Sun, nothing like the breakup of P/2013 R3 has ever been ...

How do researchers know what color ancient fossils were when they lived?Paleontologists studying fossilized feathers have proposed that the shapes of certain microscopic structures inside the feathers can reveal the color of ancient birds but new research finds that it is not yet possible to tell ...

A new dinosaur species found in Portugal is one of the largest carnivorous dinosaurs from the Jurassic period - and may be the largest land predator discovered in Europe - 30 feet long and weighing up to 5 tons. Scientists discovered bones belonging to this dinosaur north of Lisbon. They were ...

Maybe photosynthesis can be improved.That may sound like blasphemy but the easy solution to growing more food is teaching crop plants to concentrate carbon dioxide in their leaves. That could increase photosynthetic efficiency by 60 percent and yields by as much as 40 percent, according to a new ...

There are many enduring mysteries regarding the composition of the Earth's atmosphere but one may be a little closer to being solved. Researchers have discovered a microbial soil process that helps ensure that the explosive gas hydrogen remains at trace levels.  In recent decades it was found ...

People born unable to see are readily capable of learning to perceive the shape of the human body through soundscapes that translate images into sound, according to a new article in Current Biology. With a little training, soundscapes representing the outlines and silhouettes of bodies cause the ...

Soybeans are a tremendously successful crop and a new study that traced the genetic changes in varieties over the last 80 years of soybean breeding found that increases in yield gains and an increased rate of gains over the years are largely due to the continual release of greater-yielding cultivars ...

Evolutionary biologists have long considered bird song to be an exclusively male trait, resulting from sexual selection. A new paper says that's not the whole story. The results of their analysis, now published in Nature Communications, showed that the common ancestor of modern songbirds had female ...

Sardines have been a hot news topic in recent weeks. Environmental groups and others have claimed that the sardine population is collapsing like it did in the mid-1940s.  The environmental group Oceana has been arguing this point loudly in order to shut down the sardine fishery. That’s why ...

Statisticians have a rule of thumb for calibrating claims made in humanities and science papers alike. Andrew Gelman, for example, talks about statistical significance filter - "If an estimate is statistically significant, it’s probably an overestimate." A good thing to remember when you read ...

Some recent claims have warned about a link between eating red and processed meat and the risk of developing cancer.  While vegetarians unleashed their confirmation bias in full force, they were happy to ignore the uncertainties in the evidence.As often happens, concerns about reports ...

Research in The New England Journal of Medicine and Human and Molecular Genetics journals finds that mutation in the STAG3 gene is the major cause of human fertility disorders, as it provokes a loss of function of the protein it encodes.  STAG3 encodes a meiosis-specific subunit of the cohesin ...

A comparison of two hospitals and pertussis, one of which followed standard procedures and another that implemented a physician opt-in order initially and then a standing order for new mothers to receive the tetanus toxoid, reduced diphtheria toxoid and acellular pertussis vaccine (Tdap) before ...

While instruments an provide an objective measure of earthquake intensity, the intensity of ground motion is often anecdotal. How accurate and reliable are public perceptions? A new study in Seismological Research Letters suggests that a person's activity at the time of the quake influences their ...

In the War On Smart Kids Department, tiger mom mentalities may cause ethnic outcasts, say sociologists.Smart Asian kids will be shunned for being too smart? of course not. Instead, the scholars argue, the children who don't achieve might be.  Sociologists Jennifer Lee of UC Irvine Min Zhou ...

Frequent Facebook users also share a greater risk of eating disorders, according to a new psychology paper. The small sample used 960 college students (naturally) and determined that more time on Facebook was associated with higher levels of disordered eating. Females who placed greater importance ...

While Barbie was once as stereotypical as G.I. Joe, in modern years she can 'be anything.' Ken is still kind of annoying, however.Yet to some it is not enough. Barbie must go. You won't be surprised to find that an article in Sex Roles, which touts itself as "an interdisciplinary behavioral science ...

To begin, an example of failed humor.  Two friends in their 20s (called ‘L’ who is female, and ‘R’ who is male) are conversing :L: “What did the big cup say to the little cup?”R: (sarcastically) “I’m bigger than you?”L: “No, Nothing. Cups can’t talk”.R: (completely ...

There is a naive belief among some advocates that if people just had more money, their problems would be solved. Yet the saying 'money does not solve everything' exists as a truism for good reason.Less worry about basic needs is obviously good for society - in developing nations, farmers that were ...

It may seem like social media is a great way to engage people, but outside creating a flash mob of dancers or overthrowing an African dictatorship and replacing it with another one, armchair activists aren't accomplishing much.'Talk is cheap', the saying goes, and retweets and likes are even cheaper ...

Lower incomes are associated with higher obesity, though lower income in America is very much a relative term. Poor and minority kids lead the country in bedroom television ownership, so being poor in the US is not the same as in other countries.Native Americans have an advantage over other countries ...