Gene expression is impacted by social dominance?  A study of rhesus macaques published in  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says a female's social status affects how her genes turn on and off, and those who rank higher tend to be healthier - unless their social status declines.

Everyone has heard of hindsight - where the context of past events is much clearer in memory than they were at the time - but a new study of the blindsight phenomenon, where a person is cortically blind yet they can still discriminate visual information without any awareness, could make the architecture of the brain a lot clearer. 

Toward that end, Tony Ro, a neuroscientist at the City College of New York, is artificially recreating blindsight in his lab. Sound scary? Just wait.

A dramatic sea-level rise occurred at the onset of the first warm period of the last deglaciation, known as the Bølling warming, approximately 14,600 years ago. This event, referred to as Melt-Water Pulse 1A (MWP-1A), corresponds to a rapid collapse of massive ice sheets 14,600 years ago and resulted in global sea-level rise of ~14 m. 

The Tahiti Sea-Level Expedition 310 of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) was carried out in 2005 by the European Consortium for Ocean Research Drilling (ECORD) and the ECORD Science Operator (ESO) on behalf of IODP. 

Countries with a higher per capita gross domestic product (GDP) are more likely to have searches for information about the future than information about the past, according to an analysis of Google search queries in Scientific Reports.

Is there a link between online behavior and real-world economic indicators?  Maybe.

Sand is so fundamental it seems simple - like a magnetic field, just because an industry is built around something doesn't mean we understand it - but granular material like sand is actually tricky to model. From a distance, flowing sand resembles a liquid, streaming down the center of an hourglass like water from a faucet, but up close individual grains slide against each other, forming a mound at the base that holds its shape, much like a solid. 

It's baseball season.  That means some time this week you are sure to witness the following; a pitcher hits a player with the ball.  The opposing pitcher retaliates by hitting another player with a ball.  The benches look like they are about to clear, an umpire will issue a warning (or not) and things will escalate until, surely, a fight breaks out.

The Iron Dice of World War I and the many mysteries of how it actually came to fighting has nothing on the psychological machinations of America's national pastime.