Customers may grumble about having to pay fees for everything on an airplane, American airport security and a la carte pricing has certainly turned travel into a third world experience, but a new analysis has found that checked baggage fees have improved the biggest aspect of flying - getting to a destination on time.

"Because passengers changed their behavior, less weight went into the plane below the cabin," said Mazhar Arikan, a University of Kansas assistant professor in their business school. "This offset any changes in carry-on luggage, and it helped airlines improve their on-time departure performance. The below-the-cabin effect dominates the above-the-cabin effect."

Move over glass windows, something even more old school than you could be back in fashion. A new paper in Advanced Energy Materials finds that windows made of transparent wood could provide better energy efficiency than glass, while eliminating glare and providing uniform and consistent indoor lighting.  

The process starts with bleaching from the wood all of the lignin, which is a component in the wood that makes it both brown and strong. The wood is then soaked in epoxy, which adds strength back in and also makes the wood clearer. The team has used tiny squares of linden wood about 2 cm x 2 cm, but the wood can be any size, the researchers said.

If you're the type of person who lets closet clutter creep into their lives, a connected wardrobe may be for you. It reminds you to wear unworn clothes or to give them away to charity.

Like most things that invoke terms like "ethical" and "consumption", it involves guilt, and a not-so-subtle threat. If you don't wear them, the garments will automatically get in touch with a charity and ask to be recycled, with the Goodwill or whatever automatically sending out a mailing envelope for return. It uses washable radio-frequency identification (RFID) contactless technology which will tweet and message users asking to be worn depending on the weather and frequency of wear. 

The NFL's schedule makers face a lot of uncertainty when they sit down every spring to put together the next season's Monday Night Football schedule. They want viewers and they want to give teams national exposure. 

Yet the games won't be played for several months, and all sorts of things can happen that make a game which seems compelling in April a viewership bust in October: Players might be traded, injured or leave in free agency, and there is often a great deal of parity so a playoff team from one season may take a nosedive the next. A Monday Night Football schedule that once appeared to be filled with ratings winners is riddled with games few fans are interested in watching.

A disabled African penguin at Mystic Aquarium in Mystic, Connecticut has gotten a new boot, thanks to 3-D printing and some middle school students.

Yellow/Purple (AKA “Purps”), a resident of Mystic Aquarium’s endangered African penguin colony,  was left with a nonfunctional flexor tendon in her ankle following a fight with another penguin. In an initial effort to immobilize, support and protect the site of injury, veterinarians at Mystic Aquarium fashioned a boot for Purps from moldable plastic material. While adequate, the animal care team at Mystic Aquarium knew there were more modern solutions available for the boot that would not only be more durable and less cumbersome for the small bird, but also would require less time than handcrafting a boot.

23andMe has launched Genotyping Services for Research (GSR) so that researchers – no matter their level of genetics expertise – can infuse genetics into their studies.

Outdoor learning can have a significant and positive impact on children's quality of life but needs to be introduced more formally into global school curricula in order for its potential benefits to be fully realised, a new report suggests.

The case of Reo, a male chimpanzee that learned to walk again after being paralyzed due to illness, shows how much can be done to rehabilitate animals injured in captivity. So says lead author Yoko Sakuraba of Kyoto University, in an article in Primates, the official journal of the Japan Monkey Centre published by Springer.

In their normal work, researchers of the Primate Research Institute at Kyoto University use chimpanzees' interaction with computers and touch screens to study the cognition and perception of these primates. When Reo was paralyzed from the neck down, dedicated staff put this technology to further use by encouraging the animal to walk again. This is the first case in which a paralyzed chimpanzee has been rehabilitated through such a dedicated programme.

There has been plenty of criticism about academic clinical trial reporting mandated by government funding and now a new paper analyzing four companies finds that the private sector is better about it, though results vary.

In JAMA, Isabelle Boutron, M.D., Ph.D., of Paris Descartes University, Paris, and colleagues investigated the proportion of randomized clinical trials (RCTs) registered at ClinicalTrials.gov that were listed at the Clinical Study Data Request website, where companies voluntarily list studies for which data can be requested.