To sexually objectify someone is to focus on their body in terms of how it can provide sexual pleasure rather than viewing that person as a complete human being with thoughts and feelings.

Objectification has long been considered a problem in the media - stories of Mad Men star Jon Hamm invariably mention that he doesn't wear underwear - but how does it affect individual romantic relationships? 

New surveys hope to tell us, but since they are by social psychologists and the paper is in Psychology of Women Quarterly, a feminist, scientific, peer-reviewed journal, they only find that objectification of a female partner's body is related to higher incidents of sexual pressure and coercion. 

By Agus Santoso, Senior Research Associate at UNSW Australia.

It looks like it’s all over bar the shouting for the chance of this year bringing on a “super” El Niño. Or is it?

No one knows why Hypospadias, a birth defect where the urethral opening is abnormally placed, became more common among Swedish boys in recent decades. Before 1990, it happened in 4.5 per 1,000 boys, and after that increased to 8 per 1,000 boys.

Researchers looked at past attributed causes (in epidemiology, they find two curves that go the same direction and attribute causation), such as low-birth weight, being born a twin, or being born from in vitro fertilization (IVF) to conceive, but the curves did not match.

Maybe it was less reported in 1973. No one can say. So they created a new cause out of thin air: endocrine disruptors.

Though the end of the 20th century looked like we were going to see runaway temperatures around the globe, that hasn't really happened despite countries like China and Russia and Mexico and India continuing to belch CO2 into the atmosphere.

More than a dozen hypotheses have been proposed for the so-called global warming hiatus, ranging from air pollution to volcanoes to sunspots and now the University of Washington has entered the fray, saying that the heat absent from the surface is plunging deep in the north and south Atlantic Ocean, and is part of a naturally occurring cycle. 

A study has identified a protein that appears to play a key role in protecting people infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis — the bacterium that causes tuberculosis — from developing the active form of the disease. The protein, interleukin-32, was discovered to be one biomarker of adequate host defense against TB.

Tekmira Pharmaceuticals and collaborators at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, have protected nonhuman primates against Marburg virus, also known as Angola hemorrhagic fever.

There are currently no vaccines or drugs approved for human use and no post-exposure treatment that has completely protected nonhuman primates against MARV-Angola, the most deadly Marburg viral strain, with a mortality rate of up to 90 percent. This virus, which is in the same family as Ebola, has a rapid disease course (seven to nine days) in nonhuman primates. There have been two recent imported cases of MARV HF to Europe and the United States, further increasing concern regarding the public health threat posed by this deadly virus.

Paid editors on Wikipedia – should you be worried?

By Kim Osman, PhD Candidate at Queensland University of Technology

Whether you trust it or ignore it, Wikipedia is one of the most popular websites in the world and accessed by millions of people every day. So would you trust it any more (or even less) if you knew people were being paid to contribute content to the encyclopedia?

Calcium buildup in the coronary arteries of chronic kidney disease patients may be a strong indicator of heart disease risk, according to a new study in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (JASN). Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health assert that coronary calcium outperforms two other commonly used measures of subclinical atherosclerosis in predicting the risk of heart disease among individuals with kidney disease.

Approximately 50 percent of all patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) die from cardiovascular disease, but some previous studies concluded that conventional risk factors for predicting heart disease -- such as blood pressure and lipid levels -- were not as useful in CKD patients.

When America invaded both Iraq and Afghanistan, critics of President George Bush insisted that Muslim countries were not ready for democracy and he would fail. 

Were they right? Does Islam only lend itself to dictatorships?

The record in the past hundred years is not good. What was once a cradle of scientific thought hasn't produced anything meaningful since the new fundamentalism took hold. But sociologists say Muslims may be ready than western liberals think.   

By James Smith, Research Fellow in Fisheries at UNSW Australia

It may sound overly simple, but just five processes can define us as animals: eating, metabolism, reproduction, dispersal and death.

They might not seem like much, but, thanks to a mathematical model from scientists at Microsoft Research, we know that these five processes are the key to all ecosystems.