“The sweetest and most inoffensive path of life leads through the avenues of science and learning; and whoever can either remove any obstruction in this way, or open up any new prospect, ought, so far, to be esteemed a benefactor to mankind” —David Hume

In a few short weeks, it will once again be time for the Open Science Summit (yay!!), a yearly event which brings together researchers, life science professionals, students, and science enthusiasts to discuss the future of open scientific discovery, publication, and collaboration.  

Bribery and corruption rise and fall with the level of collective feeling in a society, according to research by Pankaj Aggarwal, University of Toronto Scarborough professor of marketing in the Department of Management, and Nina Mazar, University of Toronto professor of marketing.

Aggarwal and Mazar say that people in more collectivist cultures, where individuals have more communal belief and see themselves as interdependent with larger society, are more likely to offer bribes than people from more individualistic cultures where independence and freedom are more valued.

Their work suggests that people in collectivist societies may feel less individual responsibility for their actions and therefore less guilty about offering a bribe.

We've done articles on rainbows, and double rainbows and even showed you how to make a rainbow appear for that special someone - but have you ever seen a triple rainbow?

It makes environmental activists crazy, in that 'believe scientists when science agrees with us but scientists are out to kill us when science doesn't agree' kind of way, but a large study of U.S. adults found that the more science they knew and the more independent they were, the less they were worried about climate change.

"Search.  The final frontier.  These are the voyages of the frustrated Web surfer.  Its five-year mission: To explore strange new content, to seek out new ideas and new expressions.  To boldly know when someone is pulling our leg or being sincere." I'm not waiting for William Shatner to record that monologue but there are days when I can almost hear it rolling about in my head.  Search is such a universal thing for people -- we were born to it.  We resonate with memories of failed searches every time we hear someone gasp, "What did I do with my keys?"

Why would anyone build a Tubesat when the Cubesat open standard tends to dominate the picosatellite world?  Well, first, there's only been a bit over a dozen Cubesats, so it's a wide open field.  Second, the Tubesat design is actually a kit, including schematics that are pre-integrated, rather than being an open spec like Cubesat. 
In some ways, it's a little odd to compare them, much like you can't really compare an iPhone to an Android smartphone.  iPhones are a device; Android is an operating system used in over 75 different devices.  Similarly, Tubesat is a device; Cubesat is a specification that people fit their own ideas into.  Different approaches.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 33.8 percent of American adults are obese. placing them at increased risk for type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, stroke, and certain cancers.  That's a lot of fat, but not all fat is bad.

When we picture body fat, what we are thinking of is white fat but another type, brown fat, does more - it burns body fat.  It was once believed that brown fat disappeared after infancy but recent advances in imaging technology led to its rediscovery in adult humans

Women often gain weight as they age and a new study in Cell Metabolism says the sex hormone estrogen, and estrogen receptor-α (ERα) has an important yet under-appreciated role in those bigger waistlines. 

Musical cartoons can boost verbal intelligence?  We'll hiatus Science 2.0 and start watching "Phineas&Ferb" right now.

Researchers writing in Psychological Science say pre-schoolers improved their skill after only 20 days of classroom instruction using their interactive, music-based cognitive training cartoons.

Tomorrow I will fly to Frascati, where are the headquarters of INFN, the italian institute for nuclear physics. I will attend to an event there, called "Incontri di Fisica" (Physics meetings), where high-school teachers meet researchers and receive training, as well as discuss ways to improve science education and popularization in schools and outside.

I will be discussing the subject of "Science popularization with blogs" on Wednesday afternoon and then, two days later, I will be the last speaker with another short talk, where I will try to summarize some ideas on the matter. And you might help for this latter presentation.