Over the past few years, demand from the surveillance market and huge spending by governments across the globe on biometric technologies has caused the facial recognition technology market to become more accurate, less costly and significantly more mainstream.

More accurate technology and the brighter economic future it can bring has led to more traction and investment from the commercial sector. The development of 3-D face recognition technology, backed by improved imaging solutions like middleware and fast analytics, has helped the technology to overcome its traditional flaws such as poor results in low lights, pose variation and image reconstruction 

Temperatures in central China are 10 to 14 degrees Fahrenheit hotter today than they were 20,000 years ago - an increase two to four times greater than many scientists previously thought.  

If you are physically strong, social science scholars believe they can predict whether or not you are more conservative than other men.

This might seem obvious. Fitness takes a lot of individual initiative, the government can do all of the outreach programs and legislate all of the soda cups they want, but it won't make people exercise. Super-fit people have to be conservative when it comes to their own exercise, even if they are liberal about money. 

Michael Bang Petersen, associate professor in the Department of Political Science and Government at Aarhus University, and evolutionary psychology colleagues at UC Santa Barbara say the strength/politics connection is due to evolution, which is sure to annoy biologists.

The Rubber Hand illusion never fails to teach us new things - not just about neuroscience, but also about culture.

If you are not familiar with the Rubber Hand illusion, it shows that the combination of seeing a touch on a rubber hand and feeing a touch on your own creates the illusion that the fake hand is now part of your body. In a new paper, scholars did that; they asked participants to look at a fake hand being touched, while at the same time the experimenter touched the participants' own hand, hidden out of view.

Between 1994 and 2008, Canada had 66,716 hospital admissions for cycling accidents. 30% of those were head injuries. Cyclists are vulnerable road users and head injuries account for 75% of cycling-related deaths. It's a dangerous way to travel and so the debate has long been whether or not helmet legislation makes any difference in injuries. 

During that time, there was a substantial and consistent fall in the rate of hospital admissions for cycling related head injuries - and reductions were greatest in provinces with helmet legislation - but that trend had been happening before the law was enacted.

A new study uses mouse genetics to demonstrate how a handful of workhorse signaling pathways interact to construct multiple structures that comprise the vertebrate body and how crosstalk between two of those pathways - those governed by proteins known as Notch and BMP (for Bone Morphogenetic Protein) receptors - occurs over and over in processes as diverse as forming a tooth, sculpting a heart valve and building a brain. 

One Notch family protein, Notch2, shapes an eye structure known as the ciliary body (CB), most likely by ensuring that BMP signals remain loud and clear. Understanding CB construction is critical, as excessive pressure is one risk factor for glaucoma.