As the world’s money markets do their best to combat the 'credit crunch', a University of Sunderland politics lecturer says that the root of modern democracy’s money woes may lay with the first corporations – pirates.

Dr Peter Hayes is Senior Lecturer in politics at the University of Sunderland. In his latest paper ‘Pirates, Privateers and the contract theories of Hobbes and Locke’ Dr Hayes argues that the roots of modern democracy were not in Britain or the USA, but were the ‘corporations’ which were created on pirate ships during the golden age of buccaneering.

Newswise — With the economy in crisis and foreclosures at an all time high, financial anxiety among Americans seems to be soaring to new heights. In a poll distributed by the American Psychological Association (APA) to more than 1,700 U.S. adults, eight out of 10 surveyed said the economy is a significant cause of stress.

“When there is a sense of uncertainty about the future or when folks feel as if their long-term goals such as retirement or children’s college funds are being threatened, a number of emotions may surface,” says Michael Groat, PhD, a psychologist for the Professionals in Crisis program at The Menninger Clinic in Houston. “We may feel as if we are no longer in control or there may be feelings of anger or lack of trust in our government leaders. All these factors together may make it difficult for people to cope, causing not only emotional distress, but stress related physical ailments as well.”

Is there a connection between what children believe and how they act, and how strong is the link? Researchers from four universities who studied these questions were surprised by the results.

"For me the biggest surprise was how the link between beliefs and behaviors changed from kindergarten to later in childhood and adolescence," said Jennifer Lansford, one of the researchers from Duke University's Center for Child and Family Policy. "Often we assume that if someone believes something, they will act in a way consistent with those beliefs, but that wasn't necessarily the case for the kindergarteners in our sample."

You know things are bad when an insurance company tries to fix the health care system.

WellPoint Inc. is funding a competition in collaboration with X Prize Foundation to devise solutions that improve health care cost and quality. Although the actual award amount and competition guidelines won’t be ready until early 2009, the rumored jackpot is about $10 million.

According to the X Prize site , the two partners will solicit advice from various stakeholders, hold the competition, and test the finalists’ plans in WellPoint’s markets.

The means by which proteins provide a 'border control' service, allowing cells to take up chemicals and substances from their surroundings, whilst keeping others out, is revealed in unprecedented molecular detail for the first time in Science Express.

The scientists behind the new study have visualised the structure of a protein called Microbacterium hydantoin permease, or 'Mhp1', which lives in the oily membrane that surrounds bacteria cells. It belongs to a group of proteins known as 'transporters' which help cells take up certain substances from the environment around them. This is the first time scientists have been able to show how a transporter protein opens and closes to allow molecules across the membrane and into the cell, by accurate analysis of its molecular structure in different states.

Nothing drives biologists crazier than people who think the colloquial meaning of 'junk' means junk DNA is valueless. For about 15 years, scientists have known that certain junk DNA, repetitive DNA segments previously thought to have no function, could evolve into exons, which are the building blocks for protein-coding genes in higher organisms like animals and plants.

A new University of Iowa study has found evidence that a significant number of exons created from junk DNA seem to play a role in gene regulation. The findings increase our understanding of how humans differ from other animals, including non-human primates.

It's no news that women were historically excluded from the "boys club" of science but women scientists date as far back as Ancient Greece, and perhaps further. In more recent years, they have become essential to the scientific community.

Several of the women listed here are sisters or wives of scientific men. During their times, women were forced onto the backburner but, given equal rights and freedoms, might have overshadowed their masculine counterparts. Some even disguised themselves as men and most, if not all, faced tremendous adversity. They have been chosen for this list because their contributions to science cannot be ignored, nor forgotten. 

The last column here placed the financial crisis within a historical context. The financial meltdown is part of the disruptive transition from the Information Age to the Shift Age. We are moving through a period of turmoil when the old order is being replaced by a new order. The nation state economic model is being replaced by a new global model. We are at a time when the old ways no longer seem to work and yet the new realignments are not yet clear.



In the United States there have been three great waves that have arced over our society during the last 30 years. The incredible run up in residential real estate values since the late 1970s was the first arc. Except for a short period in the early 1980s and then again in the 1990s, the value of residential real estate seemed to go ever upward. This of course created a great sense of wealth for those that benefited. In the early part of this decade millions of households took advantage of historically low interest rates to take out billions of dollars of equity to use for purchases. This 30 year cycle obviously came to a crashing halt two years ago.

Lightning and gases from volcanic eruptions could have given rise to the first life on Earth, according to a new analysis of samples from a classic origin-of-life experiment by NASA and university researchers. The NASA-funded result is the subject of a paper in Science appearing October 16.

"Historically, you don't get many experiments that might be more famous than these; they re-defined our thoughts on the origin of life and showed unequivocally that the fundamental building blocks of life could be derived from natural processes," said lead author Adam Johnson, a graduate student with the NASA Astrobiology Institute team at Indiana University, Bloomington, Ind.

From 1953 to 1954, Professor Stanley Miller, then at the University of Chicago, performed a series of experiments with a system of closed flasks containing water and a gas of simple molecules. At the time, the molecules used in the experiment (hydrogen, methane, and ammonia) were thought to be common in Earth's ancient atmosphere.

Using brain imaging and chocolate milkshakes, scientists have found that women with weakened "reward circuitry" in their brains are at increased risk of weight gain over time and potential obesity. The risk increases even more for women who also have a gene associated with compromised dopamine signaling in the brain.

The results, drawn from two studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) at the University of Oregon's Lewis Center for Neuroimaging, appear in the Oct. 17 issue of the journal Science. The first-of-its-kind approach unveiled blunted activation in the brain's dorsal stratium when subjects were given milkshakes, which may reflect less-than-normal dopamine output.