The stereotype is that athletes are often less smart than their non-athletic peers and a new paper says it may not be that athletes go into more physical pursuits but that the sports themselves may lead to lower test scores.

Two groups of Dartmouth athletes were studied: 80 football and ice hockey players in the contact sports group, and 79 athletes drawn from such non-contact sports as track, crew and Nordic skiing. The football and hockey players wore helmets equipped with accelerometers, which enabled the researchers to compile the number and severity of impacts to their heads. Players who sustained a concussion during the season were not included in the analysis.

A hydrogel scaffold for craniofacial bone tissue regeneration starts as a liquid and then solidifies into a gel in the body and liquefies again for removal. 

The material is a soluble liquid at room temperature that can be injected to the point of need. At body temperature, the material turns instantly into a gel to help direct the formation of new bone to replace that damaged by injury or disease. It conforms to irregular three-dimensional spaces and provides a platform for functional and aesthetic tissue regeneration and is intended as an alternative to prefabricated implantable scaffolds. It then liquefies again for removal. 

Scholars at Indiana University  say that lower citation rates for women are due to bias.

In the past, fewer women worked outside the home and as that gradually shifted, there was hiring bias, which means historically women have had fewer science citations than men. That's simple numbers, just like fewer handicapped people and conservatives get citations in modern academia. But is that bias?

The authors say it is, and speculate it might be the trickle-down effects of having fewer female deans in science. 

There is culture cold war in America over education. One side says American kids are under-performing because teachers are not using agreed upon criteria and so students don't do as well as some other countries on international standardized tests. The other side says American kids are under-performing because the government wants to 'teach to the test' so students do better on international standardized tests.

Both sides are manned by teachers, educational institutions and unions.

Do tests adequately predict academic success? Not really. When American students took the first international standardized test in the early 1960s, they came in next-to-last. But since then, those same students have dominated worldwide science output and Nobel prizes.

As you know, when heat in soup is increased, it will eventually boil.

When time and space are heated, an expanding universe can emerge, without requiring anything like a "Big Bang", according to a new math paper.

The math behind this phase transition between a boring empty space and an expanding universe containing mass is a connection between quantum field theory and Einstein's theory of relativity. Everybody knows of the transitions between liquid, solid and gaseous phases. But also time and space can undergo a phase transition, as the physicists Steven Hawking and Don Page pointed out in 1983. They calculated that empty space can turn into a black hole at a specific temperature.

The Promised Land means different things to different people. To geologists, the site of some of the largest volcanic eruptions in earth's history might fit the bill, and that means Utah is a pretty good place to be.

30 million years ago, more than 5,500 cubic kilometers of magma erupted during a one-week period near a place called Wah Wah Springs. By comparison, this eruption was about 5,000 times larger than the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption.

Fortunately they are no longer active.

Dinosaurs were already extinct during this time period, but less well known is that 25-30 million years ago, North America was home to rhinos, camels, tortoises and even palm trees. Evidence of the ancient flora and fauna was preserved by volcanic deposits.