Did comets deliver a significant portion of the Earth's oceans millions of years after the Earth formed?  Some new evidence in Nature lends weight to the idea.

Using HiFi, the Heterodyne Instrument for the Infrared on the Hershel Space Observatory, researchers found that the ice on a comet called Hartley 2 has the same chemical composition as our oceans. Both have similar D/H ratios - the proportion of deuterium, or heavy hydrogen, in the water. A deuterium atom is a hydrogen with an extra neutron in its nucleus. 

This was the first time ocean-like water was detected in a comet.

Bribery and corruption rise and fall with the level of collective feeling in a society, according to research by Pankaj Aggarwal, University of Toronto Scarborough professor of marketing in the Department of Management, and Nina Mazar, University of Toronto professor of marketing.

Aggarwal and Mazar say that people in more collectivist cultures, where individuals have more communal belief and see themselves as interdependent with larger society, are more likely to offer bribes than people from more individualistic cultures where independence and freedom are more valued.

Their work suggests that people in collectivist societies may feel less individual responsibility for their actions and therefore less guilty about offering a bribe.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 33.8 percent of American adults are obese. placing them at increased risk for type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, stroke, and certain cancers.  That's a lot of fat, but not all fat is bad.

When we picture body fat, what we are thinking of is white fat but another type, brown fat, does more - it burns body fat.  It was once believed that brown fat disappeared after infancy but recent advances in imaging technology led to its rediscovery in adult humans

Women often gain weight as they age and a new study in Cell Metabolism says the sex hormone estrogen, and estrogen receptor-α (ERα) has an important yet under-appreciated role in those bigger waistlines. 

Musical cartoons can boost verbal intelligence?  We'll hiatus Science 2.0 and start watching "Phineas&Ferb" right now.

Researchers writing in Psychological Science say pre-schoolers improved their skill after only 20 days of classroom instruction using their interactive, music-based cognitive training cartoons.