According to a new study of 504 death penalty cases in Harris County, Texas between 1992 and 1999, a defendant is much more likely to be sentenced to death if he or she kills a "high-status" victim - a white or Hispanic victim who is married with a clean criminal record and a college degree. The study appears in a recent issue of Law and Society Review

"The concept of arbitrariness suggests that the relevant legal facts of a capital case cannot fully explain the outcome: irrelevant social facts also shape the ultimate state sanction" says Scott Phillips, associate professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Denver (DU). "In the capital of capital punishment, death is more apt to be sought and imposed on behalf of high status victims."

A generation ago it was only a brave eclectic minority of psychologists and neuroscientists who dared to address the arts. Things have changed considerably since then. “Art and brain” is now a legitimate and respected target of study, and is approached from a variety of viewpoints, from reductionistic neurophysiology to evolutionary approaches.

Things have changed so quickly that late 20th century conversations about how to create stronger art-science collaborations and connections are dated only a decade later – everyone’s already doing it! And the new generation of students being trained are at home in both the arts and sciences in a way that was rare before.

Yesterday somebody asked me here if I could explain how does a muon really decide when and how to decay. I tried to answer this question succintly in the thread, and later realized that my answer, although not perfectly correct in the physics, was actually not devoid of some didactic power. So I decided to recycle it and make it the subject of an independent post.

Before I come to the discussion of how, exactly, does a muon choose when and how to decay, however, let me make a few points about this fascinating particle, by comparing its phenomenology to that of the electron.

An international research team writing in Science says that a section of the Arctic Ocean seafloor that holds vast stores of frozen methane is showing signs of instability and widespread venting of the powerful greenhouse gas.

The results show that the permafrost under the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, long thought to be an impermeable barrier sealing in methane, is perforated and is leaking large amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.

Cosmic oddities have set astronomers onto ‘the case of the missing neighboring galaxies’. Located half a billion light-years from Earth, ESO 306-17 is a large, bright elliptical galaxy in the southern sky known as a fossil group. Astronomers use that term to emphasize the isolated nature of these galaxies but are they really like fossils,  the last remnants of a once-active community, or did ESO 306-17 gobble up its next-door neighbors? 

Marketing experts may be able to test a product's appeal while it is still being designed thanks to advanced tools used to see the human brain at work, according to researchers from Duke and Emory Universities.

So-called "neuromarketing" takes tools like the functional MRI and applies them to the somewhat abstract likes and dislikes of customer decision-making.

Though this raises the specter of marketers being able to read people's minds, neuromarketing may prove to be an affordable way for marketers to gather information that was previously unobtainable, or that consumers themselves may not even be fully aware of, says Dan Ariely, a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University.

Preventing mosquitoes from urinating as they feed on blood could prevent the spread of dengue fever, yellow fever and other diseases, say researchers writing in the American Journal of Physiology.

When mosquitoes consume and process blood meals, they must urinate to prevent fluid and salt overloads that can kill them. The research team found that blocking a protein in the renal tubules of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes prevents them from relieving themselves. The work may lead to the development of new insecticides to disrupt the mosquito's renal system, which contributes to a mosquito's survival after feeding on blood.

Sea ice may have extended to the equator 716.5 million years ago, bringing new precision to a "snowball Earth" event long suspected to have taken place around that time, geologists report this week in Science.

The new findings -- based on an analysis of ancient tropical rocks that are now found in remote northwestern Canada -- bolster the theory that our planet has, at times in the past, been ice-covered at all latitudes.

The survival of eukaryotic life throughout this period indicates sunlight and surface water remained available somewhere on the surface of Earth. The earliest animals arose at roughly the same time, following a major proliferation of eukaryotes.

I seem to have developed a reputation for hating networks, but really, it's just tough love. Complex, adaptive, self-organizing networks are fascinating (and inspired the title of this blog), and they deserve a rigorous scientific treatment. Decentralized control mechanisms are incredible, and, although they're all around us, they go completely against our instincts for good, hierarchical design for control systems. How does a cell adapt to environmental signals, in the absence of a brain or CPU? And how do we make our own, human-built networks as self-adaptive and robust as biological ones? In other words (for those of you who've endured lengthy lectures on the subject in physiology class), how do you effectively engineer homeostasis?