Peer pressure is a proven social motivator, and seeing a friend or colleague succeed at a task can boost individual effort. Researchers at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering probed this decidedly human attribute -- sensitivity to competition from peers -- and found that not only is virtual pressure from a computer-simulated peer just as motivating as the real thing, but that "fake" competition can be used for the good of science.

The research team formulated a mathematical model of human behavior that successfully predicted group responses across conditions -- one they hope other researchers will use to overcome the notoriously difficult task of encouraging wide participation in scientific projects.

Alexandria, VA - Human evolution and paleoanthropology are tricky subjects, not just because of the rarity of these fossils, but also because human nature seems to be getting in the way of modern taxonomy. In a field that is generally governed by logical rules when it comes to identifying new fossils, scientists are noticed there are some peculiarities applied to our own genus, Homo.

As an old time chessplayer who's stopped competing in tournaments, I often entertain myself with the odd blitz game in some internet chess server. And more often than not, I play rather crappy chess. So nothing to report there... However fluctuations do occur.
I just played a combinative-style game which I wish to share, although I did not have the time yet (and I think I won't have time in the near future) to check the moves with a computer program. So my moves might well be flawed. Regardless, I enjoyed playing the game so that's enough motivation to report it here.

If you read media headlines or watch television programs like "The Dr. Oz Show" you might be convinced that an out-of-whack balance of microbes causes obesity, and that stool implants or fancy yogurt will cure it.

No, you got obese because you eat too much. Every other claim is selling you something.

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."

CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (AUGUST 23, 2016). Seventy percent of football players in the US are youths 9 to 14 years of age, yet most data on head impacts sustained in this sport have been from high school, college, and professional football players. This makes it difficult to make informed decisions on how best to structure practices and games to protect younger players from concussion. A new study reported in the Journal of Neurosurgery: Pediatrics will hopefully change that. It focuses on these younger players and the head impacts they sustain throughout the football season and offers suggestions to reduce the risk of high-magnitude head impacts.

In a very severe, genetic form of microcephaly, stem cells in the brain fail to divide, according to a new Columbia University Medical Center study that may provide important clues to understanding how the Zika virus affects the developing brain.

The study was published August 24 in Nature Communications.

Due to the Zika virus, the world is suffering from its first known epidemic of microcephaly, a devastating brain developmental condition that substantially reduces the number of neurons in the brain, along with brain size and function at birth.

Just another short post on Nibiru following on from my recent petition calling for responsible mainstream journalist reporting on "doomsday stories". It's featuring in many mainstream news sites again. Thank goodness one paper, the Independent, has run a straight hoax debunking story on it. "‘Blood moon’ and ‘rogue planet Nibiru’ are on their way to kill us all, conspiracy theorists wrongly claim", kudos to them. Hurrah! It's the first straightforward Nibiru debunking article I've seen in the mainstream newspapers in the last year (since I started writing these articles). I hope this is a start of a new trend.

Bacteria that cause tuberculosis, leprosy and other diseases, survive by switching between two different types of metabolism. EPFL scientists have now discovered that this switch is controlled by a mechanism that constantly adapts to meet the bacterium's survival needs, like a home's thermostat reacting to changes in temperature.

When we go hungry, we have the ability to ignore the urge to eat such that we can carry out the task at hand. It has long been known that the brain is involved in such decisions. But how the brain coordinates the response to nutritional stress so that the body can function normally is not understood very well. Now, researchers from the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bangalore, have discovered a brain circuit that allows fruit flies to take a major developmental step in their lives despite nutritional stress.