While young people have been going to college in greater numbers over the past 20 years the Scottish higher education rate versus the English has been 'consistently and substantially' greater in Scotland, according to a unique study funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

The project, led by Dr Linda Croxford with Professor David Raffe of the University of Edinburgh, found that while the Scottish system encouraged young people to study beyond the age of 16, middle class students took most advantage.

Children and their teachers are already benefiting from online learning communities such as the Oracle Education Foundation's Think.com, but there is a real opportunity for richer learning with such systems that is yet to be tapped.

Elizabeth Hartnell-Young of the Learning Sciences Research Institute at the University of Nottingham and freelance statistician Karen Corneille of Victoria, Australia describe how they have taken Think.com as a case study and investigated how a free, password-protected online community can support children's learning.

"We found that many children engaged readily with the site," says Hartnell-Young. Even those children with less developed ICT skills benefited from interacting with others.

Solving one of the biggest problems in commercialization of fuel-cell-powered automobiles is the goal of a new $1.88 million research project on on-board hydrogen storage at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory.

To be practical, researchers say, the hydrogen storage system must be able to hold enough of the fuel for a driving range of 300 miles before refilling; no current technology meets this goal within the constraints of allowable weight and volume for passenger cars.

The Argonne research will investigate nanostructured polymeric materials as hydrogen storage adsorbents. Developed through an earlier collaboration between Argonne and the University of Chicago, the new polymer adsorbent material has shown great promise in preliminary tests.

More good news for coffee is making the "it" drink for 2007.

People who drink coffee are less likely to develop an involuntary eye spasm called primary late onset blepharospasm, which makes them blink uncontrollably and can leave them effectively ‘blind’, according to a study published in the Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery and Psychiatry.

The effect was proportional to the amount of coffee drank and one to two cups per day were needed for the protective effect to be seen. The age of onset of the spasm was also found to be later in patient who drank more coffee – 1.7 years for each additional cup per day.

Since the discovery of an Earth-like planet around Gliese 581 20 light years away in the constellation Libra, the topic of a new home has generated a lot of excitement.

Bruce Fegley, Jr., Ph.D., professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has worked on computer models that can provide hints to what comprises the atmosphere of a planet like that and better-known celestial bodies in our own solar system.

“The farther out you go in the solar system, the more water you find,” said Fegley.

Women who get most of their daily calcium from food have healthier bones than women whose calcium comes mainly from supplemental tablets, say researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Surprisingly, this is true even though the supplement takers have higher average calcium intake.

Adequate calcium is important to prevent osteoporosis, which affects an estimated 8 million American women and 2 million American men. Another 34 million Americans have low bone mass, placing them at increased risk for osteoporosis. Calcium consumption can help maintain bone density by preventing the body from stealing the calcium it needs from the bones.

The researchers' conclusions about calcium intake came from a study of 183 postmenopausal women.

Neanderthal man was not as stupid as has been made out says a new study published by a University of Leicester archaeologist.

In fact Neanderthals were far removed from their stereotypical image and were innovators, says Dr Terry Hopkinson of the School of Archaeology and Ancient History in a paper published in Antiquity.

Neanderthals were the sister species of Homo sapiens, our own species, and inhabited Europe in the Middle Palaeolithic period which began some 300,000 years ago. This period has widely been thought to have been unremarkable and undramatic in cultural or evolutionary terms.

Ancient records always referred to a vast powerful "Kingdom of Kush." Robert E. Howard had his barbarian hero, Conan, run into 'Kushites' a number of times. The New Testament referred to all of Nubia as Kush, because Kush was the name of one of the sons of Ham who settled northeast Africa.

As it turns out, not only has there been more evidence discovered about those ancient people in Sudan, there's even enough gold to make a Cimmerian warrior take notice.

At sites like Kerma, evidence of a sophisticated culture still exists. This Nubian land, long dominated by Egypt, is being discovered still today.

Although it may sound like an oxymoron, a University of Iowa anthropologist and his colleagues report the first discovery of a skull from a "pygmy-sized" giant panda -- the earliest-known ancestor of the giant panda -- that lived in south China some two million years ago.

The ancestor of today's giant panda really was a pygmy giant panda, says Russell Ciochon, UI professor of anthropology. Previous discoveries of teeth and other remains made between 1985 and 2002 had failed to establish the animal's size.

Ciochon says that the ancient panda (formally known as Ailuropoda microta, or "pygmy giant panda") was probably about three feet in length, compared to the modern giant panda, which averages in excess of five feet in length.

Embryos that are selected out as abnormal can still undergo chromosomal modifications, says Ms Tsvia Frumkin from the Racine IVF unit at Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Centre in Israel.

These findings mean that the results of preimplantation genetic screening (PGS) for chromosomal abnormalities were not always reliable and should be interpreted with caution.

PGS is offered to women with recurrent IVF failures as well as repeated miscarriages. It is based on the concept that the entire chromosomal constitution of an embryo can be represented by a single cell, which is removed from the embryo.