Schrödinger's cat is one of the famous examples of the weirdness of quantum mechanics   The thought puzzle is that you put a cat inside a box and make its life dependent on a random event, when does the cat die? When the random event occurs, or when you open the box?Obviously when the event ...

Does this galaxy make me look fat? Has Andromeda been taking skinny selfies? It turns out the way some astrophysicists have been studying our galaxy made it appear that the Milky Way might be more massive than it's neighbor Andromeda.  It isn't, says a study published in the journal Monthly ...

New findings have resolved a decades-old puzzle about a fog of low-energy X-rays observed over the entire sky. Thanks to refurbished detectors first flown on a NASA sounding rocket in the 1970s, astronomers have now confirmed the long-held suspicion that much of this glow stems from a region of ...

In Lewis Caroll's novel "Alice in Wonderland", the Cheshire Cat could disappear but its grin remained.  Why? Who knows? Like dogs named Checkers and Esther Williams swimming pools, things don't always make sense. Scientifically, that cat was an object separated from its properties - it was ...

A trigeneration system fueled entirely by raw plant oils could have great potential for isolated homes and businesses operating outside grid systems. Combined Heat and Power units have been used by large businesses for many years, producing electricity from a generator, and running heating off ...

A comparison of Baltic Sea region amber with amber from Asia could be significant - rather than being found just in Mecklenburg, Poland or Belarus, European species have been found almost 10,000 kilometers away in Fushun, even though Europe and Asia were divided by the Strait of Turgay ...

As the climate warms and sea ice retreats, the North is changing. An ice-covered expanse now has a season of increasingly open water which is predicted to extend across the whole Arctic Ocean before the middle of this century. Storms thus have the potential to create Arctic swell – huge waves ...

Before there was a war on wheat and a war on sugar, there was a war on dairy products. Nutritionists need science insight the most and are least likely to want it, they instead listen to Yogic flying instructors, actresses and Food Babes at conferences embracing the latest fad.The Finns are immune ...

Hibiscus flowers are an iconic symbol of tropical resorts worldwide but some are rather rare. Hawaii's State Flower, Hibiscus brackenridgei, is an endangered species. Everyone knows of the Hawaiian hibiscus but few are aware of an equally beautiful and intriguing related group of plants known ...

Bumblebees can glean differences in pollen quality based on floral features like petal color and that informs their decision on where to land. Bees do not sample pollen so it has been unclear how they determined quality. The new study in the Journal of Experimental Biology found that they are ...

Folate is a naturally occurring form of vitamin B found in food, while folic acid is synthetically produced and used in fortified foods and supplements. Taking folic acid before and during early pregnancy is linked to a reduction in the risk of neural tube defects like spina bifida. The current ...

Some critics go after sucrose, and some go after fructose, but new research at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior (SSIB) says it's all bad; daily consumption of beverages sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup or sucrose were shown to impair the ability ...

Resistance to artemisinin, the main drug to treat malaria, has become widespread throughout Southeast Asia.Resistance among the Plasmodium falciparum (P. falciparum) parasites that cause the disease is likely caused by a genetic mutation in the parasites, but a six-day course of artemisinin-based ...

Diverticulitis was once the refrain of a Saturday Night Live skit but it isn't funny to people who have it.   A paper in Quality of Life Research has interviews with diverticulitis patients and it confirms that many suffer psychological and physical symptoms long after their acute illness ...

A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized clinical trials on the effects of tree nuts for metabolic syndrome found a "modest decrease" in blood fats known as triglycerides and blood sugars compared to those who ate a control diet.  Tree nuts are such things as almonds, ...

For older people, and farsighted people, watching television while also reading this article can be challenging experiences because the eyes do not adjust. So people wear glasses down on their nose to read while they watch something farther away.It's the 21st century, The Future of Back To The ...

Toddlers who did not frolic and smile and laugh were once called pensive or shy or quiet but now a Preschool Feelings Checklist can label kids as depressed at 3 years of age. Using that as a factual basis, a paper in the American Journal of Psychiatry has found that depressed preschoolers ...

Marketing experts have long wanted a reliable method of forecasting responses to products and messages. A study that analyzed the brain responses of 16 individuals says even a few people can be a remarkably strong predictor of the preferences of large TV audiences, up to 90 percent in the case ...

Teach For America is a group that recruits recent college graduates to teach in poorer public schools for two years, the idea being that they would be better than substitute teachers in those districts. Education unions dislike the organization and call them 'scabs' - because they are non-union ...

Beginning in 1969, a court decision, motivated by a lack of racial integration in schools, led to students being shipped to schools in other neighborhoods. As part of a political campaign against Richard Nixon, his political opposition latched onto this forced busing and school desegregation to ...

In the summer of 2008, the US economy was clipping along as well as it had ever been. There were people in the know who recognized that actual economic output was down and the drivers were housing sales, including President Bush and his economic advisors years earlier, but they got little ...

Scholars studying the child care sector in Kansas, particularly in rural areas, have found that informal child care services create a large economic impact in the state. Informal child care services include unlicensed facilities, unreported day care services run from homes, and child care ...

Mission Accomplished. Now it's time to go back home.After two space shuttle missions and almost two decades, astronaut Mike Massimino has left NASA for Columbia University in New York. During the final servicing mission of the Hubble Space Telescope in 2009, Massimino became the first astronaut ...

In the NFL. there is a salary cap and while money in contracts can be guaranteed, the contract itself is not. For people outside the US this makes no sense but basically every contract has a bonus, which is guaranteed, and then an annual salary, which is not. A team can waive a player and the money ...