The grape escape. Shutterstock

By Mohit Kumar Jolly, Rice University

Launched in 1959, named after the inventor’s daughter Barbara, and owned by 99% of 3-10 year old girls in the USA, Barbie has been a popular request on young girls’ Christmas wish lists for 55 years.

So, should we buy them? What are these toys teaching our young girls? Barbie has been blamed for causing body image issues and even eating disorders. She has even been said to be perpetuating gender stereotypes that lead to domestic violence and the gender pay gap. But are they really all that bad?

Scam artists often prey on older people and that has fed the perception that when it comes to important financial decisions, getting old means having less competence.

Not so, according to new work using credit scores and cognitive ability tests, which instead found evidence that "crystallized intelligence" - gained through experience and accumulated knowledge - is more important that "fluid intelligence," the ability to think logically and process new information.

Past research has found that fluid intelligence decreases with old age and so being a senior citizen means being resigned to "cognitive decline."

Being obese brings with it a greater risk of heart disease, but patients who are obese before developing heart failure live longer than normal weight patients with the same condition, an 'obesity paradox' that is still unexplained.

Using data from the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities Study, researchers looked at body mass index before the initial diagnosis of heart failure in 1,487 patients and followed them for 10 years, comparing the survival rates of obese, overweight and normal weight patients after the development of heart failure. The majority of patients included in the study were overweight (35 percent) or obese (47 percent) prior to their initial diagnosis of heart failure.

Use of a light-emitting electronic device like an iPad in the hours before bedtime can adversely impact overall health, alertness, and the circadian clock which synchronizes the daily rhythm of sleep to external environmental time cues, according to a new study which compared the biological effects of reading an light-emitting electronic device (LE-eBook) to a printed book. 

Rabbits can strip grasslands bare and chew through young woody trees. John Schilling/Flickr, CC BY-ND

By Andrew Bengsen, University of New England

On Christmas Day 1859, the Victoria Acclimatisation Society released 24 rabbits for hunting, to help settlers feel more at home.

An oil palm system model based on the Agricultural Production Systems Simulator (APSIM) framework and called APSIM Oil Palm is aimed at helping growers of the crop maximize the yields of their plantations, while minimizing detrimental environmental impacts.  

"Oil palm has become a major crop in the tropics, cultivated on more than 39 million acres of land," co-author Dr Paul Nelson of James Cook University said. "Demand for the product continues to grow, and the industry is expected to keep expanding in the foreseeable future. At the same time, there is significant concern about the industry's environmental impacts, with many purchasers wanting only certified sustainable palm oil.

Science is what scientist do. And the scientific method is the method scientists follow. A tautology you say? Not according to George Ellis and Joe Silk. In an opinion paper in Nature under the title 'Scientific method: Defend the integrity of physics' Ellis and Silk argue that string theorists and cosmologists contributing to inflationary cosmology are rapidly turning physics into "a no-man's-land between mathematics, physics and philosophy that does not truly meet the requirements of any". The two authors play the 'testability card' and claim the high ground of scientific integrity, thereby dismissing a vast body of contemporary science as unscientific.

“Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 6.431 (emphasis added)

 

-- What is that even supposed to mean, “Finding eternity in the now”?

Try to avoid making this face when dealing with a climate change skeptic this holiday. bark/flickr, CC BY

By Will J Grant, Australian National University and Rod Lamberts, Australian National University