It's that time of year - the NCAA tournament, called "March Madness", when office pools all across the United States have people researching teams and reading predictions to try and optimize their chances of winning money by predicting basketball games.

They are, sadly, doomed to fail.

Last year, Warren Buffett offered $1 billion for a perfect winning bracket, but the highest scoring bracket among ESPN.com subscribers was still 18 games off - and those people pay to know sports.

More and more animal shelters and zoos have begun playing human music, the kind of fad that people who anthropomorphize animal behavior say works even though there is no evidence.

Now a new study by animal behaviorists has gone beyond that and says while they don't think human music works, music created especially for animals does.

Finally, programming for cats is not just in movies.


From the immortal classic, "Scrooged".

Rosacea is estimated to affect up to 16 million people in the United States alone, with symptoms typically including redness, visible blood vessels, and pimple-like sores on the skin of the central face.

Because rosacea affects facial appearance, it can also have a psychological impact on those who suffer from it, according to surveys by the National Rosacea Society.

A new injectable polymer  called PolySTAT strengthens blood clots and that means that  soldiers who might otherwise die from uncontrolled bleeding before reaching a surgical hospital could be saved. Likewise for civilian traumas.

A tourniquet won't stop bleeding from a chest wound, and clotting treatments that require refrigerated or frozen blood products aren't always available in the field. 

Red lead is familiar to us due to rustproof paint but artists have treasured the brilliant color for its durability since ancient times.

Yet it has limits and now scientists are learning more about why.  A combination of X-ray diffraction mapping and tomography experiments at the DESY synchrotron light source PETRA III has shown an additional step in the light-induced degradation of lead red. Key was identification of the very rare lead carbonate mineral plumbonacrite in a painting by Van Gogh.

A new system called BASIC could give synthetic biology a boost by creating artificial DNA that is faster, more accurate and more flexible than existing methods. 

To engineer new organisms, scientists build artificial genes from individual molecules and then put these together to create larger genetic constructs which, when inserted into a cell, will create the required product. Various attempts have been made to standardisz the design and assembly process but, until now, none have been completely successful.