It's Black Friday in the US - the day after Thanksgiving and was once the beginning of the Christmas season. That means a lot of shopping and that means a lot of anxiety about local retailers versus online vendors.

It turns out that local stores, especially big box retailers, have known the secret all along; people don't like to wait. If an event is far off or the price is substantially different, people will shop online. If they even have a hint that Amazon or others are taking orders for a third party, and that third party may end up shipping after Christmas, buying local looks a lot better. 

Viruses keep it simple and that makes them smart - though they are too elementary to be able to reproduce by themselves, they exploit the reproductive "machinery" of cells by inserting pieces of their own DNA so that it is transcribed by the host cell.

To do this, they first have to inject their own genetic material into the cells they infect.

An international team of researchers has studied how this occurs and how long it takes for this process to be completed.

For many years scientists and engineers have been trying to provide low-cost solar energy by developing a cheap solar cell that is both highly efficient and at the same time simple to build, enabling it to be mass produced. Now, the team led by Empa researcher Ayodhya N. Tiwari has made a major leap forward: the researchers are presenting a new manufacturing technique for CIGS solar cells, in which tiny quantities of sodium and potassium are incorporated into the CIGS layer.

The special treatment alters the chemical composition of the complex sandwich structure – thereby altering its electronic properties, as confirmed by various methods including detailed electron microscope investigations.  

A few months ago astronomers created a new 3-D map of stars at the center of our Galaxy which cleared showed the bulge at its core.

Previous explanations suggested that the stars that form the bulge are in banana-like orbits, but a paper published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society suggests that the stars probably move in peanut-shell or figure of eight-shaped orbits instead.

Video games, including the violent shooter games which are found to be good and bad in various studies, may boost children's learning, health and social skills, according to a review of research published in the
American Psychologist.

The review comes out as debate continues among psychologists and other health professionals regarding the effects of violent media on youth. An American Psychological Association task force is conducting a comprehensive review of research on violence in video games and interactive media and will release its findings in 2014.  

Epigenetics has been used for rather comical effect in some cases, with a whole lot of things being correlated to the diets of parents and even grandparents.

There is good news; your epigenetic heritage is not a prison. Rats whose mothers were fed a high-fat diet during pregnancy and nursing were able to stave off some of the detrimental health effects of obesity by exercising during their adolescence. Get the kids out and play and it doesn't matter how fat their moms are.