Vodka can make people do strange things - especially if they also have a phone. But it can also do cool things, like demonstrating how to message people using chemical signals when conventional wireless would fail.

Researchers in the UK have successfully text messaged 'O Canada' using evaporated vodka. 

The chemical signal, using the alcohol found in vodka in this case, was sent four metres across the lab with the aid of a tabletop fan. It was then demodulated by a receiver which measured the rate of change in concentration of the alcohol molecules, picking up whether the concentration was increasing or decreasing.

California academics have found that banning smoking - including inside the home and in entire cities - will reduce smoking.

This makes sense. The death penalty also cuts recidivism of criminals by 100 percent, yet we don't use it for every crime. Meanwhile, Californians want to legalize marijuana, which involve smoking. 

Wael K. Al-Delaimy, MD, PhD, professor and chief of the Division of Global Health in the UC San Diego Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, says a survey underscores the public health importance of smoking bans inside and outside the home as a way to change smoking behaviors and reduce tobacco consumption at individual and societal levels. 

Each year, someone writes a book scaring people about food and that gets covered in the New York Times and then a whole rash of junk science studies get produced affirming exactly what the book said. This has been  a tradition since the 1960s, when Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, a book of anecdotes and scary claims about how someone she heard of sprayed DDT in her cellar and died, surrounded by science jargon about carcinogens.

In a new paper, a team reports their recent work examining  the effects of spaceflight on microbial pathogens - in this case infectious disease potential of the fungal pathogen, Candida albicans, the first global gene expression profiling and phenotypic characterization of a fungal pathogen during spaceflight.

Candida is a type of fungus—a eukaryotic microorganism. It is often found in soils and water and is ubiquitous in man-made environments, including the space shuttle and International Space Station. C. albicans is part of the normal flora of human beings, present on the skin, in the oral cavity, and in the gastrointestinal, urogenital and vaginal tracts.

For most of its life, a star is pretty stable, slowly consuming the fuel at its core to keep it shining brightly, but once most of the hydrogen that stars use as fuel has been consumed, some stars evolve into very different beasts -- pulsating stars. They become unstable, expanding and shrinking over a number of days or weeks and growing brighter and dimmer as they do so.

An analysis of thyroid hormones from urine samples of zoo-living chimpanzees and bonobos has led anthropologists to conclude that hormone levels may be why chimpanzees and bonobos share similar starting conditions at birth but develop different behavioral patterns later in life.

The researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and the Royal Zoological Society of Antwerp discovered that bonobos retain elevated thyroid hormone concentrations well into adulthood, whereas in humans and chimpanzees thyroid hormone concentrations decline after puberty.

The late decline of thyroid hormones in bonobos might have consequences on their behavior and might also indicate a delayed development of their mental capacities.