In western countries there are 20 times more people aged 65 years andr older than one hundred years ago. With those demographic changes have come changes in brain research.  Understanding the mechanisms responsible for aging-related changes in cognitive processes, including spatial orientation, has become especially important for people’s everyday lives.

Al Armendariz, the top Environmental Protection Agency official in the oil-rich Southwest region, resigned from his post, effective today. It's the latest twist in the never-ending and increasingly ugly fracking fracas.

If we had a prize for Most Celebrated Business Hero in America, it would have to be Steve Jobs, the late founder of Apple.

The agile doge of Silicon Valley had a “death stare” you couldn’t escape.
He had a up-from-orphan back story you couldn’t resist.
And he had the vision of ten of his fellow technology executives.

That’s why--we’re told--Apple was so good at making the things we love. All things “I”, that is--from iPads and iPhones, to iPods and iTunes.

Lately, it also seems that Jobs and the company he left behind were also awfully good at all things Me.

Of all the available publications on 'Aircraft Nose Art', very few have investigated its psychological undercurrents.

An exception is ‘Aircraft Nose Art: From World War I to Today’ (1991). Chapter 1 of which was authored by the late George R. Klare, who was Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Ohio University.

While cold fusion remains a pipe dream, fusion as an energy source for the future continues to be funded and improved. 

In nuclear fission, current nuclear energy, the nucleus of an atom is split, but in fusion two lightweight atoms join together.  The biggest benefit is no explosion.

The ITER project is seeking to turn nuclear fusion into reality and is making use of the Tokamak reactor for this purpose. Reactors of this type and the plasma used in them to carry out fusion have a number of control problems, and to solve them, electronics engineer Goretti Sevillano has come up with some tools in her thesis defended at the University of the Basque Country.

Researchers have discovered a previously unknown particle composed of three quarks in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator. The baryon known as Xi_b^* confirms fundamental assumptions of physics regarding the binding of quarks.

 The baryon family refers to particles that are made up of three quarks and quarks form a group of six particles that differ in their masses and charges. The two lightest quarks, “up” and “down” quarks, form the two atomic components, protons and neutrons. All baryons that are composed of the three lightest quarks (“up”, “down” and “strange” quarks) are known. Only very few baryons with heavy quarks have been observed to date. They can only be generated artificially in particle accelerators, as they are heavy and very unstable. 

If you wear glasses, and they have been created recently, you are reading this article by looking through a tiny, transparent layer of nanomaterial. Anti-reflective coatings based on nanomaterials that reduce the amount of reflected light are used in most optical devices, including glasses, photo lenses, TV screens, solar cells and LED lights.

They could get better in the future. Some of the most efficient ARCs are made by mother nature and are found in the eyes of insects, like moths. The eyes of moths are covered with a layer of tiny bumps which are smaller than the wavelength of incoming light. This natural coating eliminates glare, hiding the moths from predators and improving their nocturnal vision. Some types of ARCs actually mimic the moth's eye.

Aging is unavoidable - except perhaps for the brain, say researchers. They also present counterintuitive evidence that it is what you do in old age that matters when it comes to maintaining a youthful brain - not what you did earlier in life.

Education alone won't save your brain; PhDs are as likely as high school dropouts to experience memory loss with old age. Don't count on your job either - those with a complex or demanding career may enjoy a limited advantage, but those benefits quickly dwindle after retirement.

Instead, engagement is the secret to success. Those who are socially, mentally and physically stimulated reliably show greater cognitive performance with a brain that appears younger than its years.

Gobies are the little fish you may have seen under the pier or swimming around your feet in salty water if you’ve visited the coasts of Western Europe. These seemingly boring brownish fish live a hectic life, lasting only one year. Up close, the gobies are as glamorous as gold fish, in orange fish frocks and shiny bellies full of eggs.

Secretly, they are the stars of “Fishteria Lane.” As the mating season draws to an end, guys drop dead by the hour, making goby girls go all out in their hunt for a mate to father their offspring. 

There's no time to be coy.

Researchers have presented clinical evidence that the drug gabapentin, currently on the market to treat neuropathic pain and epilepsy, also helps people to quit smoking marijuana (cannabis). Unlike traditional addiction treatments, gabapentin targets stress systems in the brain that are activated by drug withdrawal.

In a 12-week trial of 50 treatment-seeking cannabis users, those who took gabapentin used less cannabis, experienced fewer withdrawal symptoms, like sleeplessness, and scored higher on tests of attention, impulse-control, and other cognitive skills, compared to patients who received a placebo. If these results are confirmed by ongoing larger trials, gabapentin could become the first FDA-approved pharmaceutical treatment for cannabis dependence.