A new survey by the University of Iowa says casino growth in the state has not influenced gambling by residents. It instead suggests that fewer Iowans gambled overall and also that fewer people have become addicted to gambling despite a recent spurt in gaming facilities.

This is good news for those of you worried about having a crack house in your neighborhood or prostitutes on street corners. They will also apparently not lead to more drug use or prostitution.

Casino gambling was introduced in Iowa in 1991 and the state currently has 21 casinos in Iowa, three licensed by the state and the others owned and operated by Native American tribes. 
The survey was conducted between 2006 and 2008 during a family study of problem gambling. The
University of Iowa

A new paper says that altered gut microbiota in humans is associated with symptomatic atherosclerosis and stroke. 

The human body contains ten times more bacterial cells than human cells, most of which are found in the gut. These bacteria contain an enormous number of genes in addition to our host genome, and are collectively known as the gut metagenome. How does the metagenome affect health? It's unclear, other than that probiotic foods are a $30 billion placebo. But specifics are currently being addressed by researchers in metagenomic research. 

In America, human women wake up every day and decide whether they want to have sex or not.  They know somewhere a man is willing to make that happen.

In bushcrickets, the male is in charge. 

When bushcrickets mate, the male attaches a spermatophore to the female's abdomen. Alongside the sperm themselves, the spermatophore contains a protein-rich mass that the female eats after mating. It then takes several hours for the sperm to find their way into the female's reproductive tract. 

Who decides when this 'bridal present' is delivered? A paper by Bielefeld biologists Professor  Klaus Reinhold and Dr. Steven Ramm says the male determines the dynamics of this process, even long after he has 'hopped off' somewhere else. 

Higher rates of schizophrenia are found in urban areas and it can be attributed to increased deprivation, increased population density and an increase in inequality within a neighborhood, says a new paper.

Nuclear power is not mired in regulatory uncertainty because the science is unsettled, the overwhelming majority of scientists accept physics and the really overwhelming consensus of nuclear physicists accept the safety of nuclear power.

I hereby announce (create) a truly "next level" and I am sure inspiring challenge to all serious scientific philosophical thinkers who from their heart desire to participate in an honest, advanced attack on the fundamental questions that is not just another cycle of inflated sophistication or self-marketing.  Do you have some sort of understanding of our postmodern condition at the fundamental cutting edge of science and philosophy and the difficulties that emerged through it yet refuse to give up on participating in a somehow trustworthy social construction of higher level insight?  Are you disappointed with the usual contests (e.g.

UPDATE: for more on this, I only now realize that my friend at Resonaances had written about it yesterday... It is nice to see that he agrees with my conclusions, anyway. Also Peter has news on it, and as usual additional links...

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My ATLAS colleagues will have to pardon me for the slightly sensationalistic title of this article, but indeed the question is one which many inside and outside CERN are asking themselves upon looking into the new public material of ATLAS Higgs boson searches using the 2011 dataset in conjunction with the first part of 2012 data.

Dogs can sniff out Clostridium difficile, the infective agent that is responsible for many of the dreaded "hospital acquired infections", in stool samples and even in the air surrounding patients in hospital with a very high degree of accuracy, finds a study in the Christmas issue published on bmj.com today.

Yes, dogs can smell a superbug infection in poop. Can you smell a rat at BMJ this Christmas?

The findings, they write in one of this year's spoofs, support previous studies of dogs detecting various types of cancer and could have great potential for screening hospital wards to help prevent C. difficile outbreaks, say the researchers.

Opinions of the tooth fairy as kind and giving may need to be revised following "mounting reports of less child-friendly activity", according to a paper published in the BMJ's Christmas edition which is sure to fool mainstream media editors who are used to scare journalism and miracle vegetable of the week stories and may want to mix it up a little. 

Researchers from across London, they write, have become concerned following misdemeanors of the mythical character and a worrying trend in malpractice. One boy in particular became extremely distressed because the tooth fairy "had put a tooth in his left ear" after he left it under his pillow.

 An investigation turned out he was right. 

Our immune system does not shut down with age, says a new study published in PLOS Pathogens today. T cells can respond to virus infections in an older person with the same vigor as T cells from a young person.

Researchers examined individuals, younger than 40, between 41 to 59 years of age and older than 60, infected with three different viruses, including West Nile, and found the older group demonstrated perfectly normal immune responses.

Both the number of virus-fighting T cells and the functionality of the T cells were equivalent in all three groups.