In areas where freshwater is scarce, recycling of wastewater seems to be common sense.  Perhaps not, argues Amy Townsend-Small, assistant professor of geology and geography at the University of Cincinnati, and a team of researchers from the University of California, Irvine.

Their research shows that wastewater recycling processes may generate more greenhouse gases than traditional water-treatment processes. Townsend-Small, along with Diane E. Pataki, Linda Y. Tseng, Cheng-Yao Tsai and Diego Rosso, studied how different types of wastewater treatment affect emissions of one greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide. Nitrous oxide (N2O) is a long-lived and potent greenhouse gas, with a warming potential of about 300 times that of carbon dioxide.

Like vaccines and autism or genetically modified potatoes and immune systems or DDT causing cancer, some myths stick around so long they become truth despite any evidence - and cell phone radiation may be on that same track.

Yale School of Medicine researchers are not immune to jumping on the pop culture bandwagon.  It's easy if you just want to find something vague like Attention Deficit Disorder. In an experiment, they exposed pregnant mice to radiation from a cell phone placed on an active phone call for the duration of the trial. The control group of mice was kept under the same conditions but with the phone deactivated. 

Thanks to my awesome brother, I have now acquired and read the full text of the paper I blogged about yesterday: "Purification and in vitro antioxidative effects of giant squid muscle peptides on free radical-mediated oxidative systems."

I was promptly horrified by the authors' two-sentence background about the animals whose skin they were studying:

UPDATE: I've learned more about how antioxidants work since writing this post.

Maybe this is a sign that I've become cynical, but when I first read that peptides found in squid skin can slow aging, lower blood pressure, activate neurons, and reduce memory loss, I was like pshaw, right!

The old saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words.  In this case, a picture is worth millions.  Millions of tons of carbon dioxide that could be saved if we stopped throwing food into landfills, that is.

Food waste is a pet peeve of mine. Yes, we do it at my house, probably way too much, but there is only so much nagging one can do.  I don't have the yard space to do composting - yes, I know, smelly hippies will insist I do it anyway but it isn't always practical. However, there is a 100% chance is it better to put it in the garbage disposal than in the garbage, so I do that whenever practical (so, not bones).

Check out the graphic below.  Some of it we can all easily do, some of it is not so easy.

As a society, we Westerners exalt individualism and self-reliance, and yet our biology moves us in other directions. Humans evolved as social animals, and we posses a number of behaviors that motivate us towards group conformity. The feeling of wanting friends, of desiring a peer group, and of needing to feel like we are valuable members of that group is something we all can directly relate to, and we usually experience those feelings as a positive thing. Yet there is a bit of a dark side to our social nature that we might not notice, particularly because so much of its action goes on underneath the level of conscious awareness.

A randomized controlled trial showed that fear of flying can be cured independently of drug condition after 4 sessions of virtual reality exposure therapy (VRET).

The study introduced a new treatment for fear of flying. Research suggests that yohimbine hydrochloride (YOH), a noradrenaline agonist, can facilitate fear extinction. It is thought that the mechanism of enhanced emotional memory is stimulated through elevated noradrenaline levels.

The Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment has discovered a new type of neutrino oscillation in which the particles appear to vanish as they travel. The rate of oscillations was much larger than many scientists had expected, which could open the gateway to a new understanding of fundamental physics and may eventually solve the riddle of why the universe today is dominated by matter as opposed to antimatter.