An enormous eruption has found its way to Earth after travelling for many thousands of years across space. Studying this blast with ESA's XMM-Newton and Integral space observatories, astronomers have discovered a dead star belonging to a rare group: the magnetars.

X-Rays from the giant outburst arrived on Earth on 22 August 2008, and triggered an automatic sensor on the NASA-led, international Swift satellite. Just twelve hours later, XMM-Newton zeroed in and began to collect the radiation, allowing the most detailed spectral study of the decay of a magnetar outburst.

Autistics are up to 40 percent faster at problem-solving than non-autistics, according to a new Université de Montréal and Harvard University study published in Human Brain Mapping. As part of the investigation, participants were asked to complete patterns in the Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices (RSPM) test that measures hypothesis-testing, problem-solving and learning skills. 

While autism is a common neurodevelopmental disability characterized by profound differences in information processing and analysis, this study showed that autistics have efficient reasoning abilities that build on their perceptual strengths. 

In 1987, Robert Bork became the target of an organized, special interest smear campaign aimed at ruining his chances for being confirmed by the Senate as a Supreme Court justice.   Since then, a tit-for-tat approach has made Supreme Court appointments a political football.

These politicized Supreme Court nomination battles have eroded public support of the high Court and a study of public reactions during the Samuel Alito nomination process shows it is only going to get worse.

In a new book, researchers reveal how television advertisements that opposed Alito's nomination in 2005 had a disturbing side effect: Many people who viewed those highly political ads become less supportive of the Supreme Court as an institution.

LONDON, June 16 /PRNewswire/ --

- Leading Investment Management Firm to Perform Sanctions and PEP Screening in Compliance with 3rd EU Directive

A completely new species has been discovered in the Russian mountains!

Sorry, it's not Bigfoot or Yeti or Abominable Snowman or Bumble or whatever he is called where you are from, though "Bigfoot Found!" on the cover with a big "No" inside would certainly be a strategy worthy of some other science publications.   

Instead, it is a much more scientific discovery; a plant root.    Professor Hans Cornelissen and his Russian-Dutch team describe this finding in Ecology Letters.

The root belongs to the small alpine plant Corydalis conorhiza and unlike normal roots, which grow into soil, they extend upward through layers of snow. Given this novel behavior, the scientists have termed them 'snow roots'.

We can measure what people prefer and value, but do we know why? And can we predict whether a nation will be liberal or conservative, atheist or religious, polygynous or monogamous?

While researching for a forthcoming article I stumbled upon a paper by Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics, on the origin of individual values and preferences that indicate that the values of a nation are tied to its IQ.

The article, to be published in the July issue of Journal of Biosocial Science, is a quick read (despite being 20 pages long), and offers one possible explanation of why people have individual values and preferences: the Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis.

NEW YORK, June 15 /PRNewswire/ --

- Light Reading's Mobile 2012 Virtual Tradeshow debuted on Thursday, June 11, with the industry's leading mobile experts and over 1700 registrants and 10 sponsors.

Light Reading (www.lightreading.com), the leading online publication for the telecom industry, and Heavy Reading (www.heavyreading.com), its prestigious market research division, produced their first virtual tradeshow on June 11, The Mobile 2012 Virtual Tradeshow, covering the future of mobile services. With 1,774 registrants, over 850 attendees, and 10 sponsors, Light Reading's highly successful Mobile 2012 Virtual Tradeshow was the industry's largest virtual tradeshow in the wireless communications industry.

SAN JOSE, California, June 15 /PRNewswire/ --

Atmel(R) Corporation (Nasdaq: ATML) and HomeATM announced today that the recent Payments Card Industry (PCI) 2.0 certification of HomeATM's Safe-T-PIN(TM) is the result of an efficient collaboration between the two leaders on their markets. HomeATM's Safe-T-PIN, powered by Atmel's AT91SO25 secure microcontroller, is the first ever Internet Pin Entry Device (PED) to achieve such certification.

PHILADELPHIA and LONDON, June 15 /PRNewswire/ --

The Healthcare Science business of Thomson Reuters today announced that King Fahd University For Petroleum Minerals (KFUPM), has purchased Web of Science data back to 1900. KFUPM is the first university in the Saudi Arabia Consortia, and in the Gulf region, to purchase more than a century of vital data.

PHILADELPHIA and LONDON, June 15 /PRNewswire/ --

- Global Gases and Engineering Company Turns to Thomson Reuters for Comprehensive Regulatory Solution

The Healthcare Science business of Thomson Reuters today announced Linde Healthcare has purchased Liquent Regulatory Software -- a solution specifically designed to meet the regulatory needs of life sciences organizations. Linde Healthcare is a global business unit of The Linde Group, a world-leading gases and engineering company.