I recently read an article regarding a specific therapist's idea for a movement to treat World of Warcraft players with video game addiction.  These types of articles are not uncommon, World of Warcraft (WoW) currently has millions of subscribers worldwide so there is an interest in anything

Biology has just gotten a new set of standards for graphically representing biological information, biology's equivalent of the circuit diagram in electronics.

Researchers at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) and their colleagues say this visual language should make it easier to exchange complex information, so that models are accurate, efficient and readily understandable. The new standard, called the Systems Biology Graphical Notation (SBGN), is published today in Nature Biotechnology.

100 years ago you had to be rich to be fat.  Now apparently you have to be rich to stay thin.  And women add more pounds being poor than anyone.

A nationwide study that followed participants for 14 years correlates the U.S. Food Stamp Program to obesity among its users.

Researchers found that the average user of food stamps had a Body Mass Index (BMI) 1.15 points higher than non-users. The link between food stamps and higher weight was almost entirely based on women users, who averaged 1.24 points higher BMI than those not in the program, the study found. For an average American woman, this would mean an increase in weight of 5.8 pounds.

Magnetotactic bacteria are the smallest organisms to use a biological compass but exactly how these bacteria create their cellular magnets is a mystery. In a study published online in Genome Research, scientists have used genome sequencing to unlock new secrets about these magnetic microbes that could accelerate biotechnology and nanotechnology research.

Language networks are built based on different principles and, for the most part, are designed to be scale-free.  Global statistical properties of language networks are independent of linguistic structure and typology so do linguistic structures really influence the statistical properties of a language network? More concretely, does semantic or conceptual network have the same properties as a syntactic one?

Researchers at the Institute of Applied Linguistics at Communication University of China say they have shown that dynamic semantic network of human language is also small-world and scale-free but it is different from syntactic network in hierarchical structure and node's degree correlation.

Despite the overwhelming abundance of water on the planet and in our lives, the molecular structure of water has remained a mystery.

In all, water exhibits 66 known anomalies, including a strangely varying density, large heat capacity and high surface tension. Contrary to other "normal" liquids, which become denser as they get colder, water reaches its maximum density at about 4° Celsius. Above and below this temperature, water is less dense; this is why, for example, lakes freeze from the surface down.

Water also has an unusually large capacity to store heat, which stabilizes the temperature of the oceans, and a high surface tension, which allows insects to walk on water, droplets to form and trees to transport water to great heights.

There are many hypotheses about the early days of black holes.  Researchers writing in The Astrophysical Journal Letters have undertaken simulations using data taken from observations of the cosmic background radiation—the earliest view of the structure of the universe - and then applied the basic laws that govern the interaction of matter. In doing so, they say they have allowed the early universe in their simulation to evolve as they believe it did in reality.

Acupuncture has been used in East-Asian medicine for thousands of years to treat pain and some people swear by it, but if and how it works at the cellular level is largely unknown.

Using brain imaging, a University of Michigan study says they have evidence that traditional Chinese acupuncture affects the brain's long-term ability to regulate pain by activating the body's natural painkillers. 

Acupuncture needs a boost due to recent controversy over large studies showing that sham acupuncture is as effective as real acupuncture in reducing chronic pain. 

If you're the family member of a critical care patient, you prefer doctors to keep their opinions on life support decisions to themselves, according to new research that challenges a long-held belief in the critical care community that caregivers want advice on the matter . 

The research found that surrogates are virtually split when it comes to how much guidance they want to receive from physicians in making end-of-life medical choices on behalf of critically ill patients, according to lead author of the paper, Douglas B. White, of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

Tangential Science: it's not necessarily science, but it's still funny.

1.  You've all heard that blondes have more fun.   There is even a recurring urban legend that they are becoming extinct, which seems like an effort to get them to have even more fun while they are still around, but what about that most rare hair color, redheads?

Apparently they are in their 50,000th year of not getting enough respect.