The American Association for the Advancement of Science did something that was so obvious it was a surprise to find out they hadn't already done it - they formally came out against labeling GMO foods.

On June 6th, ESA’s Mars Express revisited the Argyre basin, this time aiming at Nereidum Montes, some 380 km northeast of Hooke crater. The rugged terrain of Nereidum Montes marks the far northern extent of Argyre, one of the largest impact basins on Mars and it stretches almost 1150 km and was named by the noted Greek astronomer Eugène Michel Antoniadi (1870–1944).

Self-harm is rather common among young people but we tend to think of all self harm in modern times as elaborate cutting rituals and signs of mental illness.  

Not so, many teenagers have at one time scratched, punctured or even cut themselves and hit their head forcefully against a wall - and it is behavior almost as common among boys as it is girls, despite the the steretotype. Labeling young people who self-harm as on a slippery slope to adult psychiatric states is not warranted.  Rather than over-diagnose, some knowledge is needed in order not to over-interpret the behavior of young people, says psychologist Jonas Bjärehed in his thesis at Lund University in Sweden.

The previous three installments of this series have covered Robert Batterman’s idea that the concept of emergence can be made more precise by the fact that emergent phenomena such as phase transitions can be described by models that include mathematical singularities; Elena Castellani’s analysis of the relationship between effective field theories in physics and emergence; and Paul Humphreys’ contention that a robust anti-reductionism needs a well articulated concept of emergen

If you get rich suing people, your days going after Big Tobacco are basically over. The tobacco companies have been sued for everything by now and the people who still smoke know what they are doing, and the risks, and they are willing to pay an ever-increasing amount of taxes to fund government employee unions. We can't really blame corporations for that any more. 

Luckily, the food industry could soon take its place. Not because they have done anything wrong, but rather because we live in a culture where a dizzying cross-section of people assume anyone working for a corporation must be unethical. And creating nuisance laws that make it possible to sue over labels without actually having any evidence of harm are a dream for litigation attorneys.

Solar systems with life-bearing planets are, so far, unique.  There is only one.  But they would be rare anyway, if they are dependent on the presence of asteroid belts of just the right mass, according to two US astronomers.

Rebecca Martin, a NASA Sagan Fellow from the University of Colorado and astronomer Mario Livio of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore suggest that the size and location of an asteroid belt, shaped by the evolution of the Sun's protoplanetary disk and by the gravitational influence of a nearby giant Jupiter-like planet, may determine whether complex life could evolve on an Earth-like planet. 

Using the family tree linking every known bird species, scientists now say that birds appear to be accelerating their rate of evolution. Most people did not predict that. 

They spent five years creating their tree, using millions of years worth of fossil data stretching back to Dinosaurs. They then mapped where on Earth and when in history birds' diversification took place. Their paper in Nature contains results of how 9,993 bird species currently alive globally made it to where they are today. Based on previous studies, the researchers expected to see bird speciation slowing down, but they instead found that birds' speciation rate is increasing, not declining.

Yesterday evening, on BBC4 Television, I watched a repeat of Guts: The Strange and Wonderful World of the Human Stomach. 

TV presenter Michael Mosley was the main exhibit in a public experiment at the Science Museum in London, exploring the inside story of the human digestive system.  He swallowed a mini camera in a pill that took photographs three times a second as it passed through his gut. 

An Asian elephant named Koshik can speak exactly five words in Korean that can be readily understood by those who know the language. The elephant accomplishes this in a most unusual way: he vocalizes with his trunk in his mouth.

The words include "annyong" ("hello"), "anja" ("sit down"), "aniya" ("no"), "nuo" ("lie down"), and "choah" ("good"). While cool on their own, Koshik's language skills may also provide important insights into the biology and evolution of complex vocal learning, an ability that is critical for human speech and music, the researchers say. 

Researchers say their refinements in silicon-based lithium-ion technology could lead to a high-capacity, long-lived and low-cost anode material for next-generation rechargeable lithium batteries.