In Moby Dick, Melville scoffs that “fine ladies and gentlemen should regale themselves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick whale.” Following the example of the Ancient Egyptians and Chinese, the fragrance industry has employed this essence, called ambergris, in perfume making for years.

We know that voting changes your brain a little - just reading that sentence changed your brain a little, so actions and behaviors certainly change us.  But does voting change your descendants?

Epigenetics is really a nascent field and that means there is a lot of interpretation. That also means people can try to make the case that politics is genetic. Which means partisan spinmeisters, within science and outside it, will find new avenues for the confirmation bias of their faithful.

The number of scholarly authors who have formally studied the significance of verbal (and physical) interactions at Fawlty Towers is very limited. Nonetheless, professor Annjo Klungervik Greenall, of the Department of Modern Foreign Languages, at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, has recently done so – examining in detail the many (often heated) exchanges between Manuel and Basil Fawlty, and asking how they might contribute to the idea of Linguicism.

A powerful earthquake has struck an hour ago, at 8.30UT, very close to the place where a similar event occurred on December 26th 2004. The earthquake has an estimated magnitude of 8.7 and occurred at a depth of 33km, according to NOAA. The map below shows the location of the event and the potentially affected areas.

The key air pollutants that combine to cause smog have dropped due to emissions regulations but baseline levels of ozone are continuing to creep up in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia.

Scientists from the University of British Columbia, along with state and environmental groups, are trying to figure out why average levels of ground-level ozone haven't dropped with emissions over the last decade and have instead gone up. A new report from Metro Vancouver shows ambient levels of fine particulate matter, like sulphur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide, have declined by 20 to 60 percent since 2001, but ozone has continued to rise in that same period, up 20 percent. 

Want to get an autism diagnosis but are just too darn busy?

Researchers at Harvard Medical School are here to help.  Yes, the process of diagnosing autism is complex and subjective but what about if qualified people are not there to help or you are in a rush?

Last week the Large Hadron Collider has started producing collisions at the record high 8-TeV centre-of-mass energy to the ATLAS and CMS detectors.

In the course of the first week of run almost 200 inverse picobarns have been delivered to CMS, which is absolutely satisfactory.

The integrated luminosity versus time is shown below.



And here is the peak instantaneous luminosity reached during these first few days of running:


(NB: I believe the above figure lacks a "s^-1" units).

A study published in CANCER found that while dental X-rays are necessary, frequent dental X-rays in the past led to an increased risk of developing the most commonly diagnosed primary brain tumor in the United States.

Ionizing radiation is the primary environmental risk factor for developing meningioma, which is the most frequently diagnosed primary brain tumor in the United States. Dental x-rays are the most common artificial source of exposure to ionizing radiation for individuals living in America.

Gene expression is impacted by social dominance?  A study of rhesus macaques published in  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says a female's social status affects how her genes turn on and off, and those who rank higher tend to be healthier - unless their social status declines.

During the educational reform efforts of the No Child Left Behind Act, females achieved parity with males on math tests for the first time in history, yet stereotypes die hard.  Some people think females are just not as good at math.  Is there truth to it?