Hydraulic fracturing technology, called fracking, has been around since the 1940s but has recently gained attention as the energy industry expanded cleaner natural gas production.

The inaugural Energy Census from business intelligence company Polecat says it is a big topic, with energy writers noting that CO2 emissions from energy have plummeted and coal emissions have gone even farther back in time, to the days of the first Reagan administration. Meanwhile, detractors claim it causes headaches and cancer (cancer has been the go-to disease for everything since Rachel Carson made up a scare about DDT 50 years ago) and even that it could cause the earth to deflate.

If you ask an adult for the midpoint between 1 and 9 they say 5. Mentally, they put 9 points on a ine and add 1 and then split that in half.

But if you ask a child or someone from a culture not trained in maths, the answer could be different; perhaps 3. It isn't that they don't know how to count, it's because it's actually more natural for humans to think logarithmically instead of linearly, say researchers.  Neural circuits seem to bear out that hypothesis; in psychological experiments, multiplying the intensity of some sensory stimuli causes a linear increase in perceived intensity.

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) is officially 50 years old today and this morning, for the first time ever, observations with ESO’s Very Large Telescope were made of an object chosen by the public. The winner of an anniversary competition pointed the VLT towards the spectacular Thor’s Helmet Nebula and the observations were broadcast live over the Internet. 

The signing of the ESO Convention on October 5th, 1962 and the foundation of ESO was the culmination of the dream of astronomers from five European countries; Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden. They had decided to join forces with the primary goal of building a large telescope that would give them access to the southern sky.

Duck-billed dinosaurs, also known as hadrosaurids, had an amazing capacity to chew tough and abrasive plants with grinding teeth more complex than those of cows, horses, and other modern grazers. 

Black holes may not be so dangerous to stars after all. The discovery of a star named S0-102 may help reveal whether Albert Einstein was right in his fundamental prediction of how black holes warp space and time - it orbits the enormous black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy in a blazing 11.5 years. 

Black holes, which form out of the collapse of matter, have such high density that nothing can escape their gravitational pull, not even light. They cannot be seen directly, but their influence on nearby stars is visible and provides a signature. Einstein's theory of general relativity predicts that mass distorts space and time and therefore not only slows down the flow of time but also stretches or shrinks distances. 

Serial killers and recidivist criminals of all kinds lack empathy.  So do some people with poor social skills. A compassion-based meditation program called Cognitively-Based Compassion Training (CBCT) was recently used to try and improve the ability to read the facial expressions of others.