The mystery of why life on Earth evolved has gotten more complicated, not less.

Scientists in a new paper say they have ruled out a theory as to why the planet was warm enough to sustain the planet's earliest life forms when the Sun's energy was roughly three-quarters the strength it is today.

Life evolved on Earth during the Archean, between 3.8 and 2.4 billion years ago, but the weak Sun should have meant the planet was too cold for life to take hold at this time; scientists have therefore been trying to find an explanation for this conundrum, what is dubbed the 'faint, young Sun paradox'.

Doctors who abuse prescription drugs often "self-medicate" for physical or emotional pain or stress relief, according to a new paper.

Based on focus groups with physicians in treatment for substance abuse, the findings lend insight into the reasons why doctors abuse prescription medications—as well as important implications for prevention and recognition. The lead author was Lisa J. Merlo, PhD, MPE, of the University of Florida, Gainesville.

The Moon landing in 1969 was the culmination of a decade of event-driven technology and it lent momentum to a generation of belief in the promise of a space-faring future. By 1975, the premise of the television show "Space:1999" had a believable manned base on Luna - and why not, if we had gone to the Moon after 10 years of trying, why wouldn't we have a permanent station there 30 years after the first landing and subsequent technological improvement? "Lost In Space" a decade earlier had been clearly fiction, "Space:1999" was the future.

You can think of a capacitor somewhat like a rechargeable battery. It is able to store energy temporarily except that a rechargeable battery will last much, much longer than a capacitor. The simplest capacitor is two conducting plates with a non-conducting material such as paper sandwiched between them. You can make your own capacitor using aluminum foil and a book.

Parts Needed:

Aluminum foil from your kitchen

A book with very thin pages (I used my copy of Engineering Fundamentals)

555 Timer IC (I used a KIA555p, but the NE555 will do just fine)

Snap Circuit Parts needed:

The left and right hemispheres of Albert Einstein's brain were unusually well connected to each other, according to a paper, which then determines that may have contributed to his brilliance.

The study says it is the first to detail Einstein's corpus callosum, the brain's largest bundle of fibers that connects the two cerebral hemispheres and facilitates interhemispheric communication.  Lead author Weiwei Men of East China Normal University's Department of Physics measured and color-coded the varying thicknesses of subdivisions of the corpus callosum along its length, where nerves cross from one side of the brain to the other, using  high-resolution photographs (from 2012) of the inside surfaces of the two halves of Einstein's brain.

Internet algorithms have done lots of wonderful things but can they help you live your life?

In the past, algorithms helped you find better encyclopedia answers to questions, but that is very 1990s. Google is not a search engine company now, they are an ad company that has a search engine front-end and their searches end up at Wikipedia or About.com so you're better off just going directly to those.

Modern algorithms are instead recommendation engines tailored to you.

The nearby star system Fomalhaut has been discovered to be not just a double star, as astronomers had thought, but a really wide triple star -   a previously known smaller star in its vicinity is also part of the Fomalhaut system. 

There's little quantifiable value to arts and literature but they hold a great deal more prestige in culture than science does. If you attend a Manhattan dinner party and are unfamiliar with some obscure performance artist, they will be horrified - but they won't know anything at all about adaptive radiation. 

A new social psychology paper attempt to change that quantifiability; it says that highbrow literature enhances a set of skills and thought processes fundamental to complex social relationships—and functional societies. Sorry, Fifty Shades of Grey readers, that didn't help you read minds at all.

The biggest threat to vaccine acceptance is not distrust of science, misinformation campaigns or deficit thinking among the public, but rather the failure of government and institutions to use evidence-based strategies, says a new paper.

If you want to enjoy your food, stop taking pictures of it and putting them on the Internet, say marketing scholars.

They mean you, foodies on Instagram and Pinterest. It could be ruining your appetite by making you feel like you've already experienced eating that food.

Marketing experts at Brigham Young and University of Minnesota have concluded that what happens is the over-exposure to food imagery increases people's satiation. Satiation is defined as the drop in enjoyment with repeated consumption. Or, in other words, the fifth bite of cake or the fourth hour of playing a video game are both less enjoyable than the first.