Why are scientists at the apex of their careers least likely to adopt new technology? The quick answer is obvious, they got to where they are doing things their way and there is no reason to fix something unbroken. Younger scientists don't have much choice because they don't write the checks, the use the tools the principal investigator has.

It's scientists in the middle most likely to adopt new tools, or adopt the tools of collaborators and even competitors.

What it means for Thermo Fisher Scientific is that high-status scientists may not be the most effective use of their marketing budget. For Science 2.0 it means that adoption will not happen from the top down, counting on that will slow the pace. The sweet spot for influencers is in the middle.

This not-so-distant "Internet of Things" will extend connectivity to billions of devices. Sensors could be embedded in everyday objects to help monitor and track everything from the structural safety of bridges to the health of your heart.

But having a way to cheaply power and connect these devices to the Internet has kept this from taking off. People are sick of batteries. They are sick of having to change them and they are irritated when they can't change them. In a world of information, there will need to be battery-free sensors.

Scientists have grafted neurons reprogrammed from skin cells into the brains of mice with long-term stability for the first time. Six months after implantation, the neurons had become fully functionally integrated into the brain. 

That's equivalent to about 20 years in human terms. Successful, stable implantation of neurons raises hope for future therapies that will replace sick neurons with healthy ones in the brains of Parkinson's disease patients, for example. 

Was Spanish hurdler María José Martínez-Patiño a male or female athlete? If science can't answer such a basic biological question as that, how can it determine if Lance Armstrong took performance-enhancing drugs? Yet the answer is sometimes cloudy. 

Males and females compete in different categories because men are biologically different. If men competed against women in many events, the participation of women would be scant because men would hold win all of the events and hold most of the records.  Martínez-Patiño
was a successful hurdler in the Spanish nationals but a persistent rumor - invoked again and again by female competitors - turned out to be true; Martínez-Patiño

There's a mythology about the native Americans, that they were all peaceful and in harmony with nature - it's easy to create narratives when there is no written record.

But archeology keeps its own history and a new paper finds that the 20th century, with its hundreds of millions dead in wars and, in the case of Germany, China, Russia and other dictatorships, genocide, was not the most violent - on a per-capita basis that honor may belong to the central Mesa Verde of southwest Colorado and the Pueblo Indians.

Writing in the journal American Antiquity, Washington State University archaeologist Tim Kohler and colleagues document how nearly 90 percent of human remains from that period had trauma from blows to either their heads or parts of their arms.

Issues of crime and punishment and vengeance and justice date back to time when people first gathered and in the last few years why people decide just punishment has captured the attention of psychologists and certainly defende attorneys. 

A brain imaging study in Nature Neuroscience says it can identify the brain mechanisms that underlie our judgment of how severely a person who has harmed another should be punished. Specifically, the study looked at how the area of the brain changes when an act was believed to be intentional or unintentional. They found that the imaging is different and unintentional acts  trump the emotional urge to punish the person, however gruesome the harm may be.

Climate models predicted that the equatorial Pacific trade winds should weaken with increasing greenhouse gases, yet satellites and climate stations have instead revealed a rapid and unprecedented strengthening of the Pacific trade winds since the 1990s. 

Last week's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) hearings in Atlanta on rules intended to "dramatically cut emissions" from coal-fired electricity generating stations were as contentious as expected. 

A new study commissioned by the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) estimates that the Obama Administration's new ozone restrictions could reduce GDP by $270 billion per year and carry a compliance price tag of $2.2 trillion from 2017 to 2040 - the most expensive regulation the U.S. government has ever issued. 

In total, the study finds that letting the EPA revise the ozone standard for manufacturing from 75 parts per billion (ppb) to 60 ppb - below what even  exists at national parks, such as Yellowstone and Denali - could:

- Reduce U.S. GDP by $270 billion per year and $3.4 trillion from 2017 to 2040; 
- Result in 2.9 million fewer job equivalents per year on average through 2040; 

XBiotech has begun its European Phase III study using its novel cancer drug Xilonix™ for the treatment of colorectal cancer.

Xilonix is an antiobody works to block a number of processes that tumors use to grow and spread, such as potentially inhibiting the formation of tumor blood supply and new metastasis. Blocking tumor-related inflammation may also inhibit or reverse wasting and other illness associated with the malignancy. 

The double-blinded placebo controlled study is evaluating the use of the monoclonal antibody therapy designed to block chronic inflammation associated with malignant tumor growth. The treatment is reportedly aimed at reversing disease symptoms associated with disease progression and survival.