Everyone knows about being an organ donor - you may even have a little sticker saying it's okay for doctors to remove parts from you in order to save someone else.   Pacemaker donations from funeral homes are less well known but patients who received refurbished pacemakers in the Philiipinnes have survived without complications, according to a case series reported by the University of Michigan Cardiovascular Center.

A narrow focus on carbon dioxide has long focused attention of the political and economic motivations of the European countries behind treaties like the Kyoto protocol rather than the science data and what parameters are needed to make climate simulations truly accurate.

Now that the fad aspects of global warming are behind us, researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the National Center for Atmospheric Research have taken a step to make better climate simulation.   Their results, published in Biogeosciences, illustrate the complexity of climate modeling by demonstrating how natural processes still have a strong effect on the carbon cycle and climate simulations.

Archaeopteryx (Urvogel ) is the most primitive bird yet discovered.   Found in the 1860's, it has since been dated  to 150 million years ago but new microscopic imaging of its bone structure says this ancient critter grew less like what we think of as birds and more like dinosaurs.

The bones of more recent bird fossils like Confuciusornis from the Yixian Formation in China which are more recent than Archaeopteryx demonstrate rapid growth more similar to that of modern birds, which means rapid bone growth, considered a prerequisite for flight, was not necessary for taking to the air.

Researchers studying Rhesus Macaque mothers and writing on their results in Current Biology have determined that interactions of macaque mothers with their infants have a lot of similarity to human mothers in the first month of a newborn's life.

"What does a mother or father do when looking at their own baby?" asks Pier Francesco Ferrari of the Università di Parma in Italy. "They smile at them and exaggerate their gestures, modify their voice pitch—the so-called "motherese"—and kiss them. What we found in mother macaques is very similar: they exaggerate their gestures, "kiss" their baby, and have sustained mutual gaze."

No country is immune from gender discrimination, says the World Economic Forum's Gender Gap Report, and most companies feel like they are gender neutral and perhaps are - but because people and perceptions are different it's dificult to say what is discrimination and what is sensitivity or even militancy.

It's not to say there aren't disparities - "No country in the world has yet managed to eliminate the gender gap"  they write in the report.   But it may be more looking for causation in the correlation than entrenche discrimination. 

If you're a child of the 1970s you remember peak oil - it was a book that claimed by 1992 we were going to reach maximum capacity and then it would gradually become more scarce.   If you're a fan of science fiction, it meant a world where oil was worth more than gold and we put machine guns on cars to fight over stuff.  More likely, we would come up with an alternative, but not before government lobbyists got subsidies for things we know won't work.