Leopards have but tigers have stripes.  Why the difference?   British Nobel laureate Rudyard Kipling, author of "The Jungle Book" and other stories, suggested the difference was because the leopard moved to an environment "full of trees and bushes and stripy, speckly, patchy-blatchy shadows".   Was he right or was that a just-so story?

Experimental psychologists (nee behavioral ecologists(!)) from the University of Bristol wanted to know and they investigated the flank markings of 35 species of wild cats to understand what drives the evolution of such variation. They captured detailed differences in the visual appearance of the cats by linking them to a mathematical model of pattern development.

Energy storage optimization takes a great deal of wisdom, such as the proper trade-offs between energy density or power density.   Batteries, which store energy by separating chemicals and are better for delivering lots of energy, while capacitors, which store energy by separating electrical charges, are better for delivering lots of power (energy per time).  

Life would be simpler if both were always available without high cost.  

At the AVS 57th International Symposium&Exhibition in Albuquerque, MIT reported on efforts to store energy in thin carbon nanotubes by adding fuel along the length of the tube - chemical energy, which can later be turned into electricity by heating one end of the nanotubes.

Is alcoholism genetic as well as behavioral?  Studies have suggested it in the past and scientists at Brookhaven National Lab say they have the first experimental evidence of it.

Their study compared the brain's response to long-term alcohol drinking in two genetic variants of mice. One strain lacked the gene for a specific brain receptor dopamine D2, which responds to dopamine, the brain's "feel good" chemical, to produce feelings of pleasure and reward. The other strain was genetically normal.

In the dopamine-receptor-deficient mice (but not the genetically normal strain), long-term alcohol drinking resulted in significant biochemical changes in areas of the brain well know to be involved in alcoholism and addiction.

Researchers say they have discovered a gene variant that may protect against alcoholism.   The variant, in a gene called CYP2E1, is associated with a person's response to alcohol. For the 10 to 20 percent of people that possess this variant, those first few drinks leave them feeling more inebriated than the rest of the human population, who harbor a different version of the gene.

As 2010 nears its end, the Tevatron experiments feel the monopoly of top quark physics being taken from their hands, due to the good news on the running of the Large Hadron Collider. The ATLAS and CMS experiments there have started to mine their datasets, now amounting to over 20 inverse picobarns and growing significantly by the day. These datasets contain as many top quark pairs as half an inverse femtobarn worth of Tevatron collisions, due to the 20-fold higher cross section of top pairs at the LHC.