Campylobacter's persistence in the kitchen is boosted by organic matter from chicken carcasses - "chicken juice" - and that means better cleaning of surfaces used for food preparation is an easy way to keep illness from happening.

Campylobacter aren't particularly hardy bacteria, so one area of research has been to understand exactly how they manage to survive outside of their usual habitat, the intestinal tract of poultry. They are sensitive to oxygen, but during biofilm formation the bacteria protect themselves with a layer of slime. This also makes them more resistant to antimicrobials and disinfection treatments. 

In my previous article about the Kano Computer, I demonstrated how to use MIT’s Scratch graphical programming language on the Kano to flash an LED (the “Hello World!” program of hardware hacking). In this article, I’ll again demonstrate how to flash an LED, but using a special variable in Scratch called “MotorA”. Scratch automatically handles all of the programming for MotorA to produce a “pulse width modulation” (PWM) signal on Pin 11 of the Raspberry Pi. For a primer on pulse width modulation, see this article.

The human Y chromosome has retained only 3% of its ancestral genes. So why is it a shadow of its former self? Rafael Anderson Gonzales Mendoza/Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA

By Jenny Graves, La Trobe University

The Y chromosome, that little chain of genes that determines the sex of humans, is not as tough as you might think. In fact, if we look at the Y chromosome over the course of our evolution we’ve seen it shrink at an alarming rate.

Hang on? Oh, there you are… ESA, Author provided

By Monica Grady, The Open University

Phew, what a day it was yesterday. Ended up having a quiet drink at the hotel. Last drink of the day – a nice cup of tea!

It’s a known fact that exercise is addictive. But CrossFitters – those who take part in CrossFit’s brutal workouts and stringent diet – are infamous for their fanatical devotion to their fitness philosophy. They can be found doing pull-ups and heavily weighted squats, flipping tires or hitting them with a sledgehammer, climbing ropes, tossing medicine balls, and “going Paleo<.”

India's sterilization program focuses on women. EPA/STR

By Sabu S Padmadas, University of Southampton

Is there such a thing as a Facebook murder? Is it different than any other murder? Legally, it can be. From a common sense point of view, there is no 'hate crime' status that should make a murder worse if a white person kills a latino person or a Catholic instead of a white person or a Protestant, but legally such crimes can be considered more heinous and get a special label of hate crime.

But social media is ubiquitous and criminal justice academics are always on the prowl for new categories to create and write about so a 'Facebook Murder', representing crimes that may somehow involve social networking sites and thus be a distinct category for sentencing, has been postulated. 

In the 1980s, a press release writer for an environmental group pulled a metric for meat and fossil fuel usage out of the air. It made its way into a book written by an activist and ever since then the concept of 'embedded' emissions has been used by anti-meat proponents.

"It takes a gallon of gas to make a pound of beef" is easy to remember. It is elegant. It is also completely wrong. Regardless, the virtual environmental cost of meat became a craze and it was soon followed by virtual water. The virtual water in the grain in just one part of Egypt is more than all of the water in the Nile so the concept falls apart rather quickly when it comes to the real world but scholars are still broadening the concept out to new areas.

Some people have great memories - almost like they are looking at a photograph. What is the secret? Will it be possible to change the amount of information the brain can store?

Maybe. Researchers have identified a molecule that puts the brakes on brain processing. When the brake is removed, brain function and memory recall is improved.  

Credit:McGill

FXR1P: a controller of certain forms of memory

There may be disagreement about whether or not telling teenagers to not have sex works but that could be due to puberty. In younger kids, cookie abstinence works just fine. Even the Cookie Monster can get kids to eat fewer cookies, and cookies are kind of his thing.

Deborah Linebarger, an associate professor in Teacher and Learning at the University of Iowa, studied a group of preschoolers who repeatedly watched videos of Cookie Monster practicing ways to control his desire to eat a bowl of chocolate chip cookies.

"Me want it," Cookie Monster sings in a video, "but me wait."