Today is my 43^rd birthday. When I was 34 years old, I walked along a narrow river through the city of Nanning in the south of China. I was lonely and depressed, no matter the PhD degree I had recently obtained, my freedom, the beauty all around, the women I could easily befriend wherever.

I came to the conclusion that my life is not worth its suffering, and that it must either change, that I must change, or it is idiotic to go on living. I asked myself:

After studying 137 varieties of cheese collected in 10 different countries, systems biologists at Harvard University have been able to identify three general types of microbial communities that live on cheese, opening the door to using each as a "model" community for the study of whether and how various microbes and fungi compete or cooperate as they form communities, what molecules may be involved in the process and what mechanisms may be involved.

A timely article discussing the hot topic of the production rate of pairs of vector bosons in proton-proton collisions has appeared on the Cornell arxiv yesterday. As you might know, both the ATLAS and CMS collaborations, who study the 8-TeV (and soon 13-TeV) proton-proton collisions delivered by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, have recently reported an excess of events with two W bosons. The matter is discussed in a recent article here.

Kidney donations have been in decline and a study in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (JASN) says it has discovered why; it's cheaper to get a kidney than to give one.  

For their study, Jagbir Gill, MD, MPH of University of British Columbia in Vancouver and his colleagues divided the US population based on the median household income level of residents' zip codes, and they examined the rates of living donation between 1999 and 2010 in high and low income populations.  

Government subsidies have made wind farming a leader in the renewable energy sector.

It isn't just politicians tired of subsidies and environmentalists and homeowners who don't want them near their homes, they also catch fire more than is reported. 
Wind turbines catch fire because highly flammable materials such as hydraulic oil and plastics are in close proximity to machinery and electrical wires. These can ignite a fire if they overheat or are faulty. Lots of oxygen, in the form of high winds, can quickly fan a fire inside a turbine. Once ignited, the chances of fighting the blaze are slim due to the height of the wind turbine and the remote locations that they are often in.

When global warming happens, Atlantic salmon will likely be just fine. They have shown a surprisingly good capacity to adjust to warmer temperatures that are being seen with climate change.

The finding about Atlantic species adds to similar research about the heat tolerance of Pacific salmon. Scientists studied wild salmon from two European rivers. They compared a cold-water population from Norway's northern Alta River, where water temperatures have not exceeded 18 C for 30 years, with warm-water populations from France's Dordogne River, located 3,000 kilometres south, where annual water temperatures regularly exceed 20 C.

The moon's surface has by millions of craters but it also has over 200 holes – and those steep-walled pits that in some cases might lead to caves that future astronauts could explore and use for shelter, according to new observations from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft.

The pits range in size from about 5 yards across to around 1,000 in diameter, and three of them were first identified using images from the Japanese Kaguya spacecraft. Hundreds more were found using a new computer algorithm that automatically scanned thousands of high-resolution images of the lunar surface from LRO's Narrow Angle Camera (NAC).

Scientists from Queen Mary University of London have found a successful way of identifying bird sounds from large audio collections, by using recordings of individual birds and of dawn choruses to identify characteristics of bird sounds.

They took advantage of large datasets of sound recordings provided by the British Library Sound Archive, and online sources such as the Dutch archive Xeno Canto.

California is the home of bans in the United States, everything from Happy Meals to golf courses and goldfish have come under fire.

Sometimes the bans pass, and it is always cheered as 'leadership' when that happens. Social authoritarians in other states then mimic it. But ban success can't always be quantified. In one instance, they can - with the cellphone ban. They were blamed for a lot of car accidents, so accidents must have dropped.

Except they didn't. A recent analysis found no evidence that the California ban on cellphones while driving has decreased traffic accidents.

Is there a biomarker that can spot a player versus a potential soul mate? 

University of Chicago psychologists say that if it is so, the difference between love and lust might be in the eyes - specifically, where your date looks at you could indicate whether love or lust is in the cards.

Their work found that eye patterns concentrate on a stranger's face if the viewer sees that person as a potential partner in romantic love, but the viewer gazes more at the other person's body if he or she is feeling sexual desire. That automatic judgment can occur in as little as half a second, producing different gaze patterns.