Presenting measurement values together with some educated guess on accuracy or precision is scientific standard. It is very important to any good scientist, so much so that it is basically my religion. Delta (Δ) is my god! Those statisticians who serve sigma (σ) and teach the primacy of it do not understand that delta is the larger one after all (sorry - the pun here is strictly for the geeks among you).

A video posted on A Blog Around the Clock a few days ago discusses the mechanisms behind hydrogen bonding. The first half of the video is visually basic -- simple diagrams to illustrate the points in the narrator's lesson -- and includes things like different colors for different atoms, and star shapes that appear where a bond forms.

End-stage renal disease, or chronic kidney failure, affects more than 500,000 people per year in the United States alone and is only fully treated with a kidney transplant. 

Yet there were only 17,000 donated kidneys for transplants last year and the number of patients on the transplant waiting list currently exceeds 85,000, according to the Organ Procurement and Transplant Network. 

Do social networks which features many distant connections, or "long ties," produce large-scale changes most quickly, as social media lore claims?    No, says a new study by Damon Centola,  assistant professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management.  Instead, individuals are more likely to acquire new health practices while living in networks with dense clusters of connections — that is, when in close contact with people they already know well. 

If you're a print magazine, or in marketing consumer goods, you care about packaging.

The general science magazine "New Scientist" approached neuroscience marketing firm NeuroFocus to test three different cover designs for an August issue of the magazine.

Applying their EEG-based full brain measurements of test subjects' subconscious responses to the three covers, NeuroFocus identified one as clearly superior in terms of its overall neurological effectiveness, saying it scored exceptionally well in emotional engagement, one of their primary metrics, the others being attention and memory retention. 

This neuromarketing research was the first time that the publishing industry used EEG technology to determine the appeal of cover designs. 

Fish oil has been used as an anti-inflammatory (and a lot of other things) but scientists haven't been sure how the omega-3 fatty acids in fish oil work in that capacity but a new report in Cell shows how omega-3 fatty acids both shut down inflammation and reverse diabetes in obese mice.   The report says omega-3s alleviate inflammation by acting on a receptor (GPR120) found in fat tissue and on inflammatory immune cells called macrophages, studies in mice show.

GPR120 is a G protein-coupled receptor (GPCRs), a group involved in many important cell functions and that includes the targets of many drugs. Other researchers had recently shown that five orphan GPCRs, GPR120 included, respond to free fatty acids.

McGill chemists using a technique known as photoacoustic infrared spectroscopy say they can  identify the composition of pigments used in art decades or even centuries old.

Pigments give artist's materials color and they emit sounds when light is shone on them, and Fourier-transform photoacoustic infrared spectroscopy is based on Alexander Graham Bell's 1880 discovery that showed solids could emit sounds when exposed to sunlight, infrared radiation or ultraviolet radiation.

More recent advances in mathematics and computers have enabled chemists to apply the phenomenon to various materials.

A new system  published in The Visual Computer uses sensors and wireless devices to measure three physiological parameters in real time, heart rate, respiration, and the galvanic (electric) skin response, processes that data using software, and is then used to control the behavior of a virtual character who is sitting in a waiting room.

The heart rate was reflected in the movement of the character's feet, respiration in the rising of the chest (exaggerated movements so that it can be noticed) and the galvanic skin response in the more or less reddish color of the face.