One year ago ESA's SMART-1 landed on the moon.

For researchers, the moon is a geophysical laboratory where impacts, volcanism, tectonics and effects of space weather can be studied to put together the story of the Moon’s past. The geochemistry and thus the origins of the Moon, the evolution of the Earth-Moon system and the bombardment of the inner solar system are topics addressed under lunar formation and evolution.

Experts from the SMART-1 team are now working on data calibration, analysis, archival and distribution for the scientific community and are supporting collaborations with upcoming lunar missions.

Previous studies have shown that there is a very weak correlation between experts’ judgments of cultural entertainment, such as movies, and popular judgment. These findings have been taken to mean that ordinary people don’t have “good taste.”

However, a new study by researchers at Columbia University and Boccini University, Italy, argues that when controlling for marketing campaigns, regular consumers show more “good taste” than previously thought.

The most common working definition of “good taste” utilizes the judgment of experts, who have honed their understanding of a particular cultural field through a long period of training.

Starting to diet seems to double the odds a teenage girl will begin smoking, a University of Florida study has found.

UF researchers, who analyzed the dieting and smoking practices of 8,000 adolescents, did not find the same link in boys, who were also less likely than girls to diet, according to findings released Friday in the American Journal of Health Promotion.

“Dieting was a significant predictor of initiation of regular smoking among females,” said Mildred Maldonado-Molina, Ph.D., a UF assistant professor of epidemiology and health policy research and lead author of the study. “We were expecting that this relationship was going to be stronger among females. That has been well-documented, especially because (nicotine) can suppress your appetite.

A new article published in the August issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that infants fine-tune their visual and auditory systems to stimuli during the first year of life, essentially “weeding out” unnecessary discriminatory abilities.

Lisa Scott, a psychologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and her colleagues examined several studies suggesting that infants begin to hone their perceptual discrimination to environmentally relevant distinctions by 9-12 months of age. At the same time, the discrimination of environmentally irrelevant, or less frequently encountered, distinctions declines.

Did male deer evolve less durable teeth because they expect to die young or do they die sooner because their teeth wear out?

Natural selection favors reproduction rather than survival; the cost of reproduction compromises survival. Males of species subjected to intense male-male competition for access to females are known to have shorter life expectancies than females. Earlier aging in males might be related to higher reproductive costs, especially when lifetime reproductive success in males takes place within the few years when they can win contests and maintain their dominance.

Research by the University at Albany shows that information conveyed by a kiss can have profound consequences for romantic relationships, and can even be a major factor in ending one.

In a recently published article, Susan M. Hughes, Marissa A. Harrison, and Gordon G. Gallup, Jr. reveal that many college students have found themselves attracted to someone, only to discover after they kissed them for the first time that they were no longer interested.

"In other words," said Gallup, an evolutionary psychologist, "While many forces lead two people to connect romantically, the kiss, particularly the first kiss, can be a deal breaker."