Not all objects are equal in our minds. A Picasso sculpture is not the same way as a hammer, no matter how fancy the hammer. 

The reason? We see the Picasso more as a person than an object, according to a new paper from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. And in some cases, we make distinctions between artworks — say, an exact replica of a piece created by the artist, versus one created by a different artist.

Art, in other words, is an extension of the creator, write Professor Daniel M. Bartels of Chicago Booth, and Professor George E. Newman and Rosanna K. Smith, a doctoral student, both of Yale University School of Management.

America leads the world in adult science literacy, science output and social media. That means broad social networks.

And it means, unless some field of science is your particular hot-button issue, the US is doing better in science acceptance than every other country, and spending time and money doing awareness is not really helping much.

Facial recognition software works pretty well. It measures various parameters, such as the distance between the person's eyes, the height from lip to top of their nose and various other metrics and then compares it with photos of people in a database.

Why not create emotion recognition software that can use its own custom parameters? 

Dev Drume Agrawal, Shiv Ram Dubey and Anand Singh Jalal of the GLA University, in Mathura suggest in the International Journal of Computational Vision and Robotics
has taken a three-phase approach to a software emotion detector.

A team of researchers has developed a new model to study the motion patterns of bacteria in real time and to determine how these motions relate to communication within a bacterial colony.

The researchers chemically attached colonies of Escherichia coli bacteria to a microcantilever – a microscopic beam anchored at one end, similar to a diving board – thus coupling its motion to that of the bacteria. As the cantilever itself isn't doesn't generate any vibrations, or 'noise,' this allowed the researchers to monitor the colony's reactions to various stimuli in real time.

For lovers of wild foods, autumn means things like mushrooms and fungi of dizzying variety.

Intrepid treasure hunters scour the woods in search of delectable wild mushrooms and their not-quite-meat, not-quite-vegetable qualities.

A bonus: If you find some, you may be eating something not even known to science.

The Fungi Kingdom is enormously diverse and completely under-documented. Species are tough to know, and that is without counting the billions that have gone extinct without us ever knowing about them, but of the 10 million species likely out there, only about 100,000 have been described.

You lookin’ at me?Gareth Fuller/PA

By Tom Foulsham, University of Essex

Are you being recorded? Thanks to the ubiquity of CCTV and camera phones, the answer is more than ever before likely to be “Yes”. Add to this the growth of wearable technology such as Google Glass and people are increasingly exposed to devices that can monitor and record them, whether they realize it or not.

By Marsha Lewis, Inside Science

(Inside Science TV) – One of the deadliest forces on earth is the humble mosquito. Mosquito-borne diseases like malaria, chikungunya, yellow fever and West Nile virus infect more than 350 million people and kill another 1 million people every year.

Now, scientists in Florida hope to wipe out some of these deadly diseases by genetically modifying their winged carriers.

“Mosquitoes are probably the most dangerous animal in the world. More people are killed by them [than] by anything else," said Michael Doyle, an entomologist at the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District in Key West, Florida.

That DNA makes RNA which makes protein is a simplified explanation molecular biologists use to explain for how genetic information is deciphered and translated in living organisms.

The process is more complicated than the schema first articulated nearly 60 years ago by Nobel Laureate Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the DNA's double-helix structure. Now it is known that there are multiple types of RNA, three of which—messenger RNA (mRNA), transfer RNA (tRNA), and ribosomal RNA (rRNA)—are essential for proper protein production. Moreover, RNAs that are synthesized during the process known as transcription often undergo subsequent changes, which are referred to as "post-transcriptional modifications."

After four months of frenzy by over 1500 teams, the very successful Higgs Challenge launched by the ATLAS collaboration ended yesterday, and the "private leaderboard" with the final standings has been revealed. You can see the top 20 scorers below.

Can the brown anole lizard outrun climate change? Credit: Ianaré Sévi, CC BY

By Amanda Bates, University of Southampton