Active video gaming using dancing and boxing were associated with increased heart rate, oxygen uptake and energy expenditure in a study of 18 school children in England, according to a report in Archives of Pediatrics&Adolescent Medicine.

It sure beats rest and sedentary video game play, anyway.

Low levels of physical activity have been linked to obesity. Active video game playing compared with traditional sedentary video game playing encourages more movement and could help children increase their physical activity levels, according to the study background.

New research may offer some hope to women whose fertility has been compromised by the side-effects of cancer therapy or by premature menopause.

In a new study, researchers from Monash University and Prince Henry's Institute of Medical Research found that two proteins, PUMA and NOXA, cause the death of egg cells in the ovaries.

Blocking the activity of the proteins may lead to new strategies to protect women's fertility.

They focused their studies on primordial follicle oocytes, egg cells which provide each woman's lifetime supply of eggs. Low numbers of these egg cells can also cause early menopause. 

Does subglottal resonance have a significant influence on register transition when singing falsetto? To find out, investigators at the University of Iowa decided on an innovative approach – involving helium. Or, more accurately, Helox (a.k.a. Heliox) a mixture of helium and oxygen [see safety note below].
Because helium is considerably less dense than normal air mixtures, the vocal resonant frequencies of those who breathe it tend to be higher – suggesting a possible application in falsetto research.

Reference: see this video of Lionel Ritchie singing ‘Hello’ (with helium).

While many fields realize that modernity comes to an end like any epoch eventually does, the “hard sciences”, especially physics, still rest in relatively naïve stages, still proud of their “modern” status like a teenager loving his first car. Attempts to advance beyond adolescence are countered with references to the Sokal Affair, although that affair has long since been understood in more enlightened ways and even Alan Sokal himself in the end concluded that the affair proved the enormous bias due to pure status in all sciences, news perhaps to the physicist Sokal, but certainly not to social constructionists.

Dentistry has been around for almost long as people have had teeth go bad but evidence for dentistry is another matter entirely. We don't pull off an arm when it is sore so the first human to figure out that pulling something attached to the skull would help keep people alive was taking nearly as big a chance as the first patient.

Ancient evidence of prehistoric dentistry has been discovered in a Neolithic graveyard in Pakistan and other findings in a Neolithic graveyard near Parma have detailed creative tooth work. An artificial tooth from the cemetery of Gebel Ramlah, Egypt, dates back 5,500 years.

Combat traits usually get most of the attention from researchers, because they are thought to have arisen due to intense male-male competition for access to females. Large, elaborate weapons become the focus of sexual selection studies because the connection is obvious. Collared lizards (Crotaphytus collaris), for example, have bite force correlated with head width, and it positively predicts the number of offspring produced in a breeding season, suggesting sexual selection on head morphology and the role of attacking traits.

In a few weeks I will speak in Torino, Italy at Comunicare Fisica 2012, a conference devoted to the communication of Physics in the media, in schools, through web sites, etcetera. And I need your help !

Let me explain. I have submitted an abstract which reads as follows:

A balanced and well-researched Wired article by Jason Kehe reveals the latest "yoo-hoo transmission to aliens"  stunt.  Of course I consider these things to be, at best, dopey, with a small but significant chance of being thoughtlessly dangerous for all of humanity.  Above all, to cast such noises outward, based on untested assumptions, without at least offering to discuss it first with our planet's population and its greatest sages?  That is simply rude.

Laboratory modified corn has shown some progress in treating a rare, life-threatening childhood genetic disease. Researchers have been developing enzyme therapeutics for lysosomal storage diseases - rare but devastating childhood genetic diseases – for more than a decade. 

In the most severe forms of these inherited diseases, untreated patients die in early childhood because of progressive damage to all organs of the body and currently, enzyme treatments are available for only six of the more than 70 diverse types of lysosomal storage diseases.

Doctors don't want to be general care physicians, they want to specialize, and it is a problem that will only get worse because it involves money.

Primary care physicians are at the heart of health care in the United States, they are the first to diagnose patients and ensure those patients receive the care they need.  But faced with increased regulations, paperwork, the onslaught of defensive medicine, malpractice costs and staggering medical school bills, many are instead opting to become specialists.