Sure, high energy physics costs billions these days (and watch out for birds - and lightning) but table-top experiments with tuned lasers and sensitive detectors can also continue to achieve the precision necessary for exploring the basic laws of physics at the heart of relativity and quantum mechanics.

During the recession, a number of people have begun to value work less (unless finances force them to value work much, much more) -  time away from family, less leisure time and fewer self-improvement activities have begun to get noticed.

In other words, the human condition that causes us to devalue something until we no longer have it is in full force.   A new study also indicated that recession-related stress tends to manifest differently in men and women.

Wayne Hochwarter, the Jim Moran Professor of Business Administration in the Florida State University College of Business, and research associates Tyler Everett and Stuart Tapley, decided to find out how attitudes toward work had changed during recent times.

If you like to read science studies you are most likely to get them through one of two avenues; the long-standing business model has been that a print journal gets the study and does the work formatting it and lends their 'goodwill' to it with marketing - in return, they hold copyright and subscribers pay to read it.   A more recent approach has been companies that instead charge the scientists to publish the study but reading it is free - open access versus toll access, proponents claim, though in a practical sense someone is either paying to read or someone is paying to publish.

People will pay more for an iPhone, or any product, if it is owned by someone the consumer has 'positive' envy of, such as a friend or celebrity they like, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.

But it works the other way also; those with 'malicious' envy or contempt of someone who has a product would instead buy, for example, a BlackBerry instead of an iPhone.  The researchers say their discoveries about the motivations that result from different kinds of envy could be key to understanding marketing in the future.

Alcohol is among the most commonly abused substances and men are almost twice as likely as women to develop alcoholism but there have been no clear reasons for this difference. 

A new study in Biological Psychiatry says that it may be biological and that dopamine is an important factor.  Dopamine is a catecholamine, molecules that serve as hormones and neurotransmitters,  and is a precursor of adrenaline.   Dopamine has multiple functions in the brain but the researchers considered it important in their research on a biology of alcoholism because of its pleasurable effects when it is released by rewarding experiences, such as sex or drugs.

If you've commented anonymously on this site or thousands of others where you are not a registered member, you've come across the Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) box - and maybe you dread it because, when it doesn't recognize the letters you think you are seeing, you are stuck.

Venu Govindaraju, a computer scientist at the University of Buffalo who pioneered machine recognition of human handwriting, says a 21st-century solution to CAPTCHA problems may rest in the early days of human culture - handwriting.