The forests of the coastal regions from California to British Columbia are known for unique and ancient animals and plants, like redwoods, tailed frogs, mountain beavers and even folk tales of the legendary Bigfoot (also known as Sasquatch).

Now it has something else.  Citizen scientists from the Western Cave Conservancy and arachnologists from the California Academy of Sciences have reported a newly discovered spider. named Trogloraptor ("cave robber") for its cave home and spectacular, elongate claws.  The only thing missing is evidence of it feasting on Orc flesh.

A team of Portuguese researchers have developed amathematical tool that can classify any region in the world according to itspattern of development into one of 5 types - each with specific characteristicsand predictable behaviours - that call for different interventions and policymeasures. The discovery, just out  inNature’s Scientific Reports,  representsa major step towards a new type of city planning - objective and, mostimportantly,  independent of the personalvisions, interests and ever changing politics .

A version of this article with less scientific details (so easier to read) can be found here.

A team of Portuguese researchers have developed a mathematical tool that can classify any region in the world according to its pattern of development into one of 5 types, each with specific characteristics and predictable behaviours that call for different interventions and policy measures. The discovery, just out in Nature’s Scientific Reports,  represents a major step towards a new type to city planning - objective and most importantly,  independent of personal visions, interests and politics.

Too hot to grill outside?  Too cold?  Stuck in a New York City Restaurant?  

Here is how you pan fry a steak.  Put a bunch of salt and pepper on it, some butter too.  Heat an oven to 450 degrees.  Iron skillet too, as hot as you can get it on a stove. Once both are hot, throw the steak in there and disabled the smoke alarm. Cook it for two minutes or so, then flip it over, take it off the stove and stick the whole thing in the oven for maybe 6 minutes.  

Result; a delicious pan-friend steak as good as anything as you will get in a restaurant; and up to a 40% increased risk of prostate cancer, according to a new study in Carcinogenesis which, you can tell by the name, is a pretty scary magazine.

The latest literature suggests that brain activity patterns change at an early stage in Alzheimer's disease. Moreover, there is reason to believe that, instead of being the consequence of structural damage, they might be the cause.

Funny how you can go from darling of the intelligentsia to pariah in a short amount of time.  As I have mentioned before, when he was at Scienceblogs.com and then Wired.com, a few of us used to joke that whatever we wrote was going to end up in a Jonah Lehrer column next week.  Now its August of 2012 and even the rumor that Lehrer (who resigned from The New Yorker last month) was back at another Conde Nast publication, Wired, got a hasty disclaimer from them.

That's a legendary, Jayson Blair kind of plummet.

A few days ago I was asked by a Washington Times reporter, Emily Esfahani Smith, to comment on a soon to be published paper concerning the issue of liberal (or, rather, anti-conservative) bias in the academy. I am weary of the Washington Times, a paper that is well known (among liberals) to have a decidedly conservative (or, rather, anti-liberal) bias of its own, but agreed to respond in writing to Emily’s questions. The piece was published a few days later, and I was actually quoted pretty much correctly (even though the piece itself did have the predictable slant, featuring a title that goes far beyond the findings of the paper referred).

In the 'we must do something even if it does not work' department, it isn't always permanent; vapor recovery mandates for new gas stations in Pennsylvania are quietly dying. The Department of Environmental Protection today announced it will not enforce a requirement for new gas stations to install costly vapor recovery systems.

It's still the law, current regulations require facilities in southeast and southwest Pennsylvania to maintain vapor recovery systems, which are attached to gas pump nozzles to siphon off fumes while pumping gasoline, but they are not going to endorse it. A notice regarding the issue was submitted for publication in this week's Pennsylvania Bulletin.

DNA sequencing is getting faster and cheaper, but it's still pretty scary to patients who don't understand the difference between a risk factor and 'I have a gene for this disease' - doctors are also still unclear how they will be able to use this information.

When genomic data needs is a contest.

When we think about agriculture, technology and the future there is one apparent truth—we will need to produce more with less.  We are going to need to produce more food,with higher quality, closer to urban centers, with fewer agricultural inputs and impacts.