LONDON, July 31 /PRNewswire/ -- 87% have no plans of leaving their twenty-something lifestyle behind

- 98% don't think a sex life is key to a successful Relationship

- 99% think of themselves over their man first

PLUS an outstanding 2 out of 5 women want to leave the UK for good

A staggering two out of five women want to flee the UK in pursuit of economic security, a new survey by Canderel reveals today. The state-of-the-nation study into 40's and 50's women also uncovers a new behavioural trend for this generation, focusing on wellness over sexiness.

It may seem like an odd marketing campaign but "Come visit Spain, the European point of entry for cocaine" remains apt.

A study of randomly selected Spanish euro notes carried out by chemists at the University of Valencia (UV) has shown that they contained traces of cocaine at an average concentration of 155 micrograms, which is the highest rate in Europe, according to an article published in the latest issue of Trends in Analytical Chemistry. The researchers also carried out a comparative study of the methods currently used in detecting the presence of cocaine on bank notes worldwide.

The most recent report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime warns that Spain is still the major point of entry of cocaine into Europe. In 2006, 41% of all hauls of the drug made on the continent were made on Spanish soil, where 50 metric tonnes were seized, followed by Portugal, with 35 metric tonnes. The UN also says the rate of cocaine use doubled in Spain between 1999 and 2005, increasing from 1.6% to 3% of those aged between 15 and 64, which is more than twice the rate for western Europe as a whole (1.2%).

Geoscientists have long presumed that the tropics remained warm throughout Earth's last major glaciation 300 million years ago but new evidence indicates that cold temperatures episodically gripped even equatorial latitudes at that time.

Geologist Gerilyn Soreghan of Oklahoma University found evidence for this conclusion in the preservation of an ancient glacial landscape in the Rocky Mountains of western Colorado. Three hundred million years ago, the region was part of the tropics. The continents then were assembled into the supercontinent Pangaea.

Climate model simulations are unable to replicate such cold tropical conditions for this time period, said Soreghan. "We are left with the prospect that what has been termed our 'best-known' analogue to Earth's modern glaciation is in fact poorly known."

We have long been fascinated by the concept of absolute zero, the temperature at which everything comes to a complete stop, but physics tells us absolute zero cannot be reached but only approached - and the closer you get, the more interesting phenomena you find.

Three scientists from ESF's EUROCORES Programme EuroQUAM gave insight into this 'cool' matter at the event "The Amazing Quantum World of Ultra Cold Matter", held at this year's ESOF (Euroscience Open Forum) in Barcelona. It was co-organized by the European Science Foundation (ESF) and The Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO) within the collaborative research programme "Cold Quantum Matter" (EuroQUAM).

Maciej Lewenstein leads the quantum optics theory group at ICFO and is a Humboldt Research Prize Awardee.

A new study published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B investigates the genetic and geographical relationships between different forms of crimson rosellas and the possible ways that these forms may have arisen.

Dr Gaynor Dolman of CSIRO's Australian National Wildlife Collection says there are three main color 'forms' of the crimson rosella – crimson, yellow and orange – which originated from the same ancestral population and are now distributed throughout south eastern Australia.

"Many evolutionary biologists have argued that the different forms of crimson rosellas arose, or speciated, through 'ring speciation'," she says.

Part 1 on The Plausibility of Life

Darwin is famous for convincingly arguing that natural selection can explain why living things have features that are well-matched to the environment they live in. In the popular consciousness, evolution is often thought of as natural selection acting on random mutations to produce the amazing tricks and traits found in the living world. But “random mutation” isn’t quite right - when we describe evolution like this, we pass over a key problem that Darwin was unable to solve, a problem which today is one of the most important questions in biology. This key problem is the issue of variation, which is what biologists really mean when they talk about natural selection acting on random mutations. Variation and mutation are not the same thing, but they are connected. How they are connected is the most important issue covered Kirschner and Gerhart’s The Plausbility of Life. It is an issue Darwin recognized, but couldn’t solve in those days before genetics really took off as a science.

Natural selection really works on organisms, not directly on mutations: a particular cheetah survives better than other cheetahs because it can run faster, not because it has a DNA base ‘G’ in a particular muscle gene. A domesticated yeast can survive in wine barrel because of how it metabolizes sugar, not because of the DNA sequence of a metabolism gene. I know what you’re thinking: this is just a semantic game over proximal causes. But this is not just semantics, it is a real scientific problem: what is the causal chain that leads from genotype to phenotype, that is, from an individual organism’s DNA sequence, mutations included, to the actual physical or physiological traits of the complete organism?

Sometimes, during my daily browsing of the Web for news and interesting angles on the sport science world, I get lucky and hit a home run.  I stumbled on this great May 2007 Wired article by Jennifer Kahn, Wayne Gretzky-Style 'Field Sense' May Be Teachable.  It ties together the people and themes of several of my recent posts, focusing on the concept of perception in sports.

Wayne Gretzky is often held up as the ultimate example of an athlete with average physical stature, who used his cognitive and perceptual skills to beat opponents. Joining Gretzky in the "brains over brawn" Hall of Fame would be pitcher Greg Maddux, NBA guard Steve Nash and quarterback Joe Montana.  They were all told as teenagers that they didn't have the size to succeed in college or the pros, but they countered this by becoming master students of the game, constantly searching for visual cues that would give them the advantage of a fraction of second or the element of surprise.

With respect to binge-drinking, “shot-gunning” a beer involves inserting a hole in the beer can and drinking it FAST. The game is so popular that a shotgun beer opener is even available to interested enthusiasts through the "liquorsnob" website. Similarly, too much of this kind of consumption may eventually lead to a hole in the heart.

Drinking more than one or two drinks per day for women and men, respectively, excessive drinking, as defined in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Dietary Guidelines, may cause a debilitating condition involving the heart known as “metabolic syndrome.”

SAN FRANCISCO, July 30 /PRNewswire/ --

- Lance Armstrong to Participate in Live Auction