An international research team has developed a new method to analyze the global genome, or the metagenome of the intestinal microbiota. The intestinal microbiota is all the bacteria found in the digestive tract.  The metagenome corresponds to all the genes in these bacteria. 

They believe their method method markedly simplifies microbiome analysis and renders it more powerful.  The scientists have thus been able to sequence and assemble the complete genome of 238 intestinal bacteria, 75% of which were previously unknown.  

The 37th International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP) began last Thursday in Valencia, Spain with three days of parallel sessions, now moves on to plenary sessions until Wednesday, summing up the current state of the art in the field. The plenary sessions will be webcast.

Mindfulness meditation is all the rage in meditation circles but does it work? Most research claiming benefits have focused on lengthy, weeks-long training programs using people who already like meditation. A new paper in Psychoneuroendocrinology is about a small study and the authors found that brief mindfulness meditation practice – 25 minutes for three consecutive days – alleviates psychological stress. 

    Many high IQ Asperger sufferers think that their rationality is ultimately superior. Their moralizing provides judgments; their “honesty” blurts them out. Such behavior is usually felt to be inappropriate. Rationalizing such as a somehow more upstanding, righteous way is in many cases quite silly especially from a rational perspective. Their often narrowly focused moralizing does precisely not submit tacitly held values to rational analysis.

 

Probiotics are a popular fad but there is little evidence they are anything more than a well-marketed placebo. Like homeopathy, at least that means the only harm will be in your wallet.

If you call yourself a paleo diet aficionado, you probably eat a lot of bugs. As many as you can. Because finding enough food was the kind of struggle only dinosaurs can sympathize with - an ant diet is a struggle.

All across the world, there is one thing babies share in common; their size, if they are born to healthy, well-educated, well-nourished mothers.

Two years have passed since the discovery of the Higgs boson (on July 4th, 2012), and the young particle still causes excitement. Originally it was the excess of Higgs decays to photon pairs as seen by the ATLAS experiment - but that anomaly has vanished with more data and more careful analyses. Then, it was the turn of the twin peaks: ATLAS again saw an inconsistent mass measurement with photon pairs and Z boson pairs.

The dose makes the poison, it is often said, and it is true. Lots of medicines and chemicals are harmless or beneficial in reasonable quantities but dangerous in high quantities. What about CO2 in plants? Plants need it for food but they also recognize too much is a bad thing. 

Biologists have been studying a long-standing mystery concerning the way plants reduce the numbers of their breathing pores in response to rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.

The authors report the discovery of a new genetic pathway in plants, made up of four genes from three different gene families that control the density of breathing pores—or "stomata"—in plant leaves in response to elevated CO₂ levels.

There are numerous ways to address carbon emissions but are we choosing the right approaches? America and Europe have invested heavily in subsidizing solar and wind generation and solar panels - but critics contend that the same money spent modernizing older buildings would have done far more than funding Chinese corporations or wealthy homeowners has.

Low-carbon energy won't cost  more than what is currently spent on today's fossil-dominated energy system, according to new research from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) and partners.