Fashion and beauty magazines are tremendously successful, as are television ad campaigns where women who are 5'10" and weigh 120 lbs. model jeans. Clearly, most women do not look like that and never will, so why do they buy magazines and clothes that remind them of it?

While critics insist that Americans, the fattest people on the planet, are under too much pressure to be thin, the truth is instead that they like role models, no differently than how some parents will buy a particular magazine if it has a female scientist on the cover.

Researchers have witnessed how football-shaped carbon molecules known as
buckyballs
arrange themselves into ultra-smooth layers, all in real time, and by piecing that together with theoretical simulations, the investigators believe they can advance the field of plastic electronics. 

Buckyballs are spherical molecules which consist of 60 carbon atoms (C60), named such because they are reminiscent of American architect Richard Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes. With their structure of alternating pentagons and hexagons, they also resemble tiny molecular footballs.

Brand Beckham. Dave Thompson/PA Wire

By Tamara Friedrich, University of Warwick

Victoria Beckham has been named Entrepreneur of the Year by Management Today. She topped their list of 100 successful entrepreneurs thanks to her fashion company’s turnover, which has grown from £1m to £30m in the past five years, and its employment growth, which has grown from three members of staff to 100 in the same time.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Gavin Andrew Stewart, CC BY

By Arnaud Chevalier, Royal Holloway and Olivier Marie, Maastricht University

Germany and the rest of Europe are celebrating the 25th anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the associated communist regimes in Eastern Europe.

No need to say goodbye to the print book. Amy Johansson/Shutterstock

By Andrew Prescott, King's College London

“Analog” and “digital” are the two polar opposites of our modern world.

The word “analog” has become our catch-all term for what we see as slow, one-way and limited in functional possibilities; while “digital” is our synonym for the dynamic, interactive and fluid.

Analog is old; digital new. Paper has always been the epitome of the analogue: a physical medium which can receive, present and preserve information but otherwise remains static and fixed.

The structure of an asymmetrical ABC transporter complex has been determined with the aid of a high-resolution cryo-electron microscope.

ABC transporters cause bacteria and other pathogens to become resistant to antibiotics. They can also help cancer cells to defend themselves against cytostatic agents and thus determine whether chemotherapy will succeed.   

"ABC transporters causes diseases such as cystic fibrosis, while on the other hand they are responsible for the immune system recognising infected cells or cancer cells," explains Professor Robert Tampé from the Institute for Biochemistry at the Goethe University. 

Credit: Filip Bunkens/Flickr

By Meredith Knight, Genetic Literacy Project

Who wants a healthy gut? Apparently a lot of people. The probiotics industry is expected to reach $45 billion annually in the next 4 years, just selling add-ons to the bacteria we already walk around with. That’s aside from the billions going into the pharmaceutical and agricultural research and development of the microbiome and its potential for new drugs.

As both a word and an idea, 'medieval' carries centuries of connotation of a murky and brutal pre-scientific age. Swanson Scott/US Fish&Wildlife Service 

By Louise D'Arcens, University of Wollongong and Clare Monagle, Monash University

A serious epidemic of poliomyelitis that struck the Republic of the Congo in 2010 has been identified as a vaccine-resistant strain of polio.

The epidemic affected 445 people in the city of Pointe-Noire, the economic capital of the country, killing almost half of them. The researchers fear the emergence of other strains against which vaccines would have little effect.