Humans navigate complex social situations in deciding who to befriend or to abandon - a "frenemy" is someone who is both friend and enemy while the old military saying is that 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend'.

Animal social networks also use sophistication in judging social configurations and a new paper in Animal Behaviour applied a long-standing theory in social psychology called "structural balance."  

How do we often find something tiny in a large area? 

When our brains begin a targeted search, various visual and non-visual regions of the brain mobilize to track down that person, animal or thing. That means that if we're looking for a youngster lost in a crowd, the brain areas usually dedicated to recognizing other objects, or even the areas attuned to abstract thought, shift their focus and join the search party. The brain rapidly becomes highly focused child-finder, and redirects resources it uses for other mental tasks.

Wildfires turn millions of hectares of vegetation into charcoal each year but it wouldn't seem like it ends up in the oceans.

Yet researchers have found that this charcoal does not remain in the soil, as previously thought. Instead, it is transported to the sea by rivers and thus enters the carbon cycle. The researchers analyzed water samples from all over the world. They demonstrated that soluble charcoal accounts for ten percent of the total amount of dissolved organic carbon. 

Pharmaceuticals don't have a discovery problem, or a financing one, they have a political one that impedes everything else. Politics have a greater direct effect on the pharmaceutical industry than anything else in the US, and correspondingly drug companies makes considerable investments in election campaigns, just like unions and any other special interest reliant on government.

The November elections kept the face of Washington the same as 2010, with President Obama in the White House, Democrats still in control of the Senate and Republicans still controlling  the House of Representatives - but that means the pharmaceutical industry will be impacted in a variety of ways. 

A new study has identified hundreds of previously unrecognized small aftershocks after Utah's deadly Crandall Canyon mine collapse in 2007, which suggest that the collapse was perhaps bigger than previous estimates.

Six coal miners died in the Aug. 6, 2007 mine collapse, and three rescuers died 10 days later. The mine's owner initially blamed the collapse on an earthquake, but the University of Utah Seismograph Stations said it was the collapse itself, not an earthquake, that registered on seismometers.

Some breast cancer patients report difficulties with memory, concentration and other cognitive functions following cancer treatment.

Determining whether that is psychosomatic or a sign of underlying changes in brain function has been a focus among scientists and medical doctors.  

A new paper found a significant correlation between poorer performance on neuropsychological tests and memory complaints in post-treatment, early-stage breast cancer patients — particularly those who have undergone combined chemotherapy and radiation.