Greenpeace was founded on a pretense of humanitarian action - between 1969 and 1971, they gathered together because they wanted to put an end to hydrogen bomb testing. Later they lost their way and it became about whales and, in the US, being a political action committee for an entire raft of anti-science issues, protesting everything from clean energy to food. Thanks for doing your part to cause global warming, Greenpeace.

'A peculiar Scottish disorder' is described in the Scottish Medical Journal (SMJ), August 2011 vol. 56 no. 3, pp. 164-166 (by Doctor I. B. McIntosh.)

 “A highly contagious behavioural affliction is now endemic in highland areas of Scotland. Pretravel advice ought to include a health warning to sport-lovers venturing north into wild, highlands of Gaeldom. It particularly affects young adults and predominates in men, although women are affected. The disorder can be acute or chronic and when severe, it can threaten one’s life and limbs. Acute attacks may bring spontaneous recovery in months, but the chronic state can last for a life-time. Death will overtake some before it runs its inevitable course.”

It was the late astronomer and author Carl Sagan who popularized the phrase “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” and originated the closely related concept of scientific skepticism.

In the case discussed here, skeptics we should be.

Yesterday evening I chanced to attend, invited by a friend, the opening of the 2013-2014 academic year of the university of Venice "Ca' Foscari", which was held at the Malibran theater. It was the first time I attended one such event, since technically (and practically) I am not an academic, but a researcher at the INFN, the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics. I do occasionally teach university courses (I just took a break from doing so after 5 years of teaching a course of subnuclear physics for 5th year undergraduates); but I do that for the university of Padova, not Venice - my office is at the department of physics of the university of Padova. Besides, Venice does not have a course of laurea in Physics.

Oxygen was essential for advanced life to evolve; ancient dinosaurs and modern large-brained mammals needed a lot of oxygen to keep their large and sophisticated organisms running.   Some simple organisms like bacteria can survive without oxygen, but all higher organisms need it our atmosphere's 21 percent oxygen is essential for the human brain to function. 

So why did life not explode when oxygen levels rose dramatically 2.1 billion years ago? The oxygen content 2.1 billion years ago was probably the same as when life exploded around 542 million years ago - the Cambrian explosion, where oxygen levels rose to up to 10 pct. Before that life consisted of small and simple, typically single-celled life forms.

If you walk by the checkout counters at most supermarkets,you might come to believe that changing your behavior is almost impossible.  Every month, the headlines from countless magazines scream out with advice to lose weight, get in shape, and help yourself to feel better.   Apparently, everyone is constantly struggling with their weight and fitness.

Lifestyle programs focused on high-intensity interval training or the Mediterranean diet have shown results for improving the heart health of people with abdominal obesity, finds a new study.

"Each of these lifestyle interventions alone is known to have an impact, but no one has studied them together in a longer term," says Dr. Mathieu Gayda, one of the study's authors and an exercise physiologist at the Montreal Heart Institute. "Our results show that the combination of the two interventions supersized the benefits to heart health."

The heart health benefits included significant improvements in body fat mass, cholesterol and blood pressure levels, exercise capacity, muscle endurance, weight loss, waist circumference, resting heart rate and blood sugar control.

Reading this article while someone else read a piece in People means your brain has already been shaped differently than that of the other person. Each experience sends us off on divergent branches, so imaging of brain areas used for understanding language in native Japanese speakers won't reshape how we learn. but it show find that pitch-accent in words pronounced in standard Japanese activates different brain hemispheres depending on whether the listener speaks standard Japanese or one of the regional dialects.

The paper in Brain and Language examined if speakers of a non-standard dialect used the same brain areas while listening to spoken words as native speakers of the standard dialect or as someone who acquired a second language later in life.

Some of the more recent dramatic disasters in world-wide markets have occurred, not because people panicked or an election did not go someone's way, but because financial institutions have taken to hiring physicists who wrote papers on predicting chaos.

If non-linear is just linear in really small steps, then predicting and controlling nonlinearity is manageable. But those extreme chaotic events, the "dragon kings", have not obeyed numerical models yet.

An upcoming paper in Physical Review Letters seeks to tame that savage chaotic breast again, with a simple model of chaos predicting that it is possible not only to predict an extreme event, like a stock market collapse, but to intervene and prevent it from happening.

An important goal in spoken-language-systems research is speaker diarization - computationally determining how many speakers feature in a recording and which of them speaks when.

To date, the best diarization systems have used supervised machine learning; they're trained on sample recordings that a human has indexed, indicating which speaker enters when. In a new paper, MIT researchers show how they can improve speaker diarization so that it can automatically annotate audio or video recordings without supervision: No prior indexing is necessary. 

They also discuss, compact way to represent the differences between individual speakers' voices, which could be of use in other spoken-language computational tasks.