A groundbreaking environmental study to be published in a prestigious American science journal proves that mercury atmospheric emissions will end up in fish in as little as three years. Biologists from the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, played a key role in designing and carrying out the experiment.

The study concludes that if mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants and other industrial activities were to be cut immediately, the amount showing up in fish would begin to go down within a decade.

This breakthrough study (called METAALICUS – Mercury Experiment to Assess Atmospheric Loading in Canada and the United States) involved government agencies and universities on both sides of the border. It has global implications.

French surgeons successfully removed a woman’s gall bladder through her vagina, according to a report in the September issue of Archives of Surgery.

The history of surgery has moved toward less invasive procedures, according to background information in the article. “Whenever it was possible, patients would ask for a surgical procedure that left no outer scarring and resulted in no postoperative pain,” the authors write. “Patients, both male and female, independent of age and body shape, dislike scars, not only for cosmetic reasons but because scars indicate they have undergone treatment because of illness.

Online multiplayer communities are social networks built around multiplayer online computer games. Members of these communities typically share an interest in online gaming and a great deal of the interaction between them is technologically mediated. Marko Siitonen from University of Jyväskylä studied social interaction in online multiplayer communities in his doctoral thesis of speech communication.

- Online multiplayer gaming is a playground which can give us clues about the future of social and technological developments, Siitonen states.

Online multiplayer games enable the formation of lasting relationships

Online multiplayer games typically encourage interaction between players: some go even as far as demanding it.

Quick: You’re walking by a store window and you see a sign that says, “20% off the original price plus an additional 25% off the already reduced sale price.” So, how much is the discount" Consumers often mistakenly think the total discount is 45% off the original price when, in fact, the true discount is 40%. A thought-provoking new study from the October issue of the Journal of Consumer Research explores why consumers frequently think a double discount is a better deal than a single discount of the same total magnitude.

“Retailers frequently use the strategy of double discounts for their regular promotions or to induce customers to open a credit card account with them. Such errors in peoples’ judgments of the net effect of multiple price discounts . . .

An international team of astronomers might have discovered the missing link in the evolution of the so-called magnetic cataclysmic variable stars. They determined the spin and orbital periods of the binary star Paloma. They found that the Paloma system has a weird way of rotating that fills the gap between two classes of magnetic cataclysmic stars. Their results will soon be published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Cataclysmic variables (CVs) are a class of binary stars made up of a white dwarf [1] and a normal star much like our Sun. Both stars orbit so close to each other that the white dwarf accretes matter from the companion star. In most of the several hundred CVs known, the matter spirals around the white dwarf, forming a disk, before being accreted and incorporated into the star.

Using atom-level imaging techniques, University of Michigan researchers have revealed important structural details of an enzyme system known as "Mother Nature's blowtorch" for its role in helping the body efficiently break down many drugs and toxins.

The research has been detailed in a series of papers, the most recent published online this month in the journal BBA Biomembranes.

The system involves two proteins that work cooperatively. The first, cytochrome P450, does the actual work, but only when it gets a boost from the second protein, cytochrome b5. To complicate matters, the two proteins can interact only when both are bound to a cell membrane.