High-achieving American students tend to be white and well-off, much like throughout all of history.

Your galaxy has a supermassiv black hole - so does mine as does every large galaxy.

But how did they grew so big is a matter of speculation.

Einstein predicted gravitational waves; ripples in space-time, generated by bodies changing speed or direction. Bodies, for instance, such as pairs of black holes orbiting each other. When galaxies merge, their resident central black holes are doomed to meet. They first waltz together then enter a desperate embrace and merge. Towards the end of this dance they're sending out gravitational waves at a frequency we can detect and played out again and again across the Universe, such encounters create a background of gravitational waves, like the noise from a restless crowd.

Obesity, along with diabetes and associated consequences like cardiovascular, neurological and renal diseases, is increasing worldwide. Along with focusing on smarting eating, research is on to understand the biological mechanisms.
  

In obesity, fatty acids, derived mostly from adipose tissue, alter lipid metabolism in other tissues such as liver and skeletal muscles. Both impaired fatty acid metabolism and glucose are hallmarks of diabetes.

In a recent study in the journal Biochemistry, a research group applied fluorescent methods to measure the rate by which fatty acids bind to and move across the fatty acid membrane to become metabolized.  

Wind turbines often disappoint because the models that justified them weren't all that accurate.

But as wind turbines themselves hopefully improve, modeling may as well. And output power may get some extra energy from an unexpected direction: below. 

According to the authors of a new paper, many wind turbine array studies overlook the fact that important airflow changes occur inside the array.

Academic researchers are already bogged down in a sea of government and institutional bureaucracy, committee meetings, guidelines, unspoken rules and lengthy regulations.

Will they embrace a formalized top-down process for collaborating?

A group of scholars in communications, neuroscience, psychology, population studies, statistics, biomedical engineering and pediatrics hope so. They think their framework would improve things for the researchers that study genes, brain, and environmental factors that matter to the outcomes of population. They seek acknowledgement that future research needs to focus on the examination of the broader population to provide better science on the lives of all individuals in our society. 

As we near the end of 2013, if a mutual fund manager does not have successful Company X - be it Netflix or anything else that has done well this year - the owners of the mutual fund shares are going to have a lot of questions.

As a result of that competitive pressure, the mutual fund manager may buy Company X - at its all-time high, after others are quite profitable in it - just to show it in the portfolio.