Though girls at a young age enjoy Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM), by the time they graduate from college their interests have changed. Women still prefer the life sciences and dominate the social sciences, but in other areas like physics the representation is not the same as the broad population. Engineering, which has the highest equality in pay between genders, still lags in women despite their efforts to recruit more females.

A team of psychologists report on an intervention for college undergraduates which found that female first-year students participate more actively and feel less anxious when they are able to work in small groups or "microenvironments" that are mostly female. 

It may be sexist but when more women are on ballots, political parties do better, according to a new paper.

Whether or not that is because women will vote for gender over the best candidate is unclear, but it does mean that the belief that people will not vote for women is  not true. The authors analyzed changes on municipal election laws in Spain which instituted a quota for female candidates. With other factors being equal, the scholars found that parties that increased their share of female candidates by 10 percentage points more than their opponents enjoyed a 4.2 percentage-point gain at the ballot box, or an outright switch of about 20 votes per 1,000 cast. 

Rubber is natural and the main ingredient for many everyday products, from boots to condoms to surgical gloves. Roughly 70 percent of the global supply of rubber is used in tires. 

The television version of George R.R. Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire", named after the first book "Game Of Thrones" returns to television this Sunday. Like the books, it is full of War Of The Roses-style intrigue, indiscretions and, of course, swords.

The most sought-after blades in Westeros are made from Valyrian steel, forged using ancient magic. But could you make your own Valyrian steel sword using real-life chemistry? ACS Reactions collaborated with cosplaying chemistry fanatic and material scientist Ryan Consell to see if we could blend metallurgy with Westerosi magic.

All plants store solar energy in the form of carbohydrates with the help of a metallic compound. Chemically storing sunlight would also be ideal for society's energy needs but developing this requires a better understanding of exactly what happens when photons strike molecules. The primary processes run on timescales of only a few hundred femtoseconds (one femtosecond = 10-15s).

An international collaboration has been able to map the evolution of the chemical bonds in these kinds of ultrafast processes on the level of orbitals.  Using quantum chemical calculations, they were successful in interpreting the data and obtaining a detailed picture of the intermediates and reaction kinetics. 

When people start to put on weight do they drink diet soda more often, or does diet soda lead to weight increases?

A new observational study says San Antonio men and women ages 65 and older got fat because of diet soda. The San Antonio Longitudinal Study of Aging (SALSA), led by Helen P. Hazuda, Ph.D., professor of medicine in the School of Medicine at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, gathered data on health status and lifestyles of 749 Mexican-American and European-American elders, then tracked the health outcomes in 466 survivors for more than nine years.