It's certainly the case that 'dark matter', like 'Smurf' or 'government regulation', has in recent times become a de facto explanation for the unexplained.   We aren't big believers in magic so mysterious, undetected forces that explain everything probably actually explain nothing - and tossing out Newton in the process  brings on a higher order of scrutiny, since he has been declared irrelevant often before only to survive quite nicely.

Dark matter is currently unable to reconcile all the current discrepancies between measurements and predictions based on theoretical models and competing theories of gravitation have therefore been developed - their problem is that they conflict with Newton's theory of gravitation.

If you want to learn a little something about 'characteristic curvature', you're in the right place.   Hydrophilic surfactants love water, but lipophilic surfactants love oils and dislike water.

Okay, if you were expecting an article about Jessica Alba, you can stop reading.

But if chemistry is your thing, a new research protocol developed by Dr. Acosta and colleagues from the University of Toronto's Department of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry builds on more than 30 years of phase behavior studies of microemulsions, the clear, stable liquid mixtures of oil, water and surfactant, and the concept of hydrophilic-lipophilic difference.

NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, launched June 2008, has certainly started its career with a (big) bang, discovering a new class of pulsars and watching flaring jets in galaxies billions of light-years away.

Now it's going after another cosmic mystery; high-energy particles in cosmic rays.

The description of compounds and interactions between atoms is one of the basic objectives of chemistry. Admittedly, chemical bonding models, which describe these properties very well, already exist. However, any deviation from the normal factors may lead to improving the models further. Chemists with Professor Thomas M. Klapötke at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) München have now analyzed a molecule, which has an extremely short bond length.

Increased social stress in childhood and young adulthood has a direct link to later increased dating violence, and that young social stress is impacted by things like unemployment and economic worries, according to Murray Straus, professor of sociology and co-director of the University of New Hampshire Family Research Laboratory.  The research, based on a 32-nation study,  was presented at the conference on “War, Terrorism, and Social Stress: Impacts on Crime and the Criminal Justice System” at the Institute of Criminology, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Monday, May 4, 2009.

He studied 14,252 university students from 68 universities in 32 nations in an International Dating Violence Study.

'Drought-proofing' Australia's urban regions by installing large domestic water tanks may enable the dengue mosquito Aedes aegypti to regain its foothold across the country and expand its range of possible infections, according to a new study published in PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases. 

Dr Nigel Beebe and colleagues from the University of Queensland, CSIRO Entomology, the Australian Army Malaria Institute, and the Communicable Diseases Branch of Queensland Health, Brisbane, challenge the common assumption that climate change will drive the spread of this mosquito.