Feeling kind of full of yourself over the holidays? You're not alone but there may be help on the horizon! An article on MSNBC.com reveals new findings about the roles that microbes play in your digestive tract. Two different types were isolated and they were found to be partially to blame for how many calories your body could separate from different types of food. 

You can absolutely bet when a marketing department uses the word "ethical" - about its lingerie - someone is out to make a buck at your expense. And they think you will believe anything, my environmental friends.

Pulickel Ajayan, the Henry Burlage Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, is being awarded the MRS Medal from the Materials Research Society and has been named by Scientific American magazine as a Research Leader within the 2006 "Scientific American 50" -- the magazine's prestigious annual list recognizing outstanding acts of leadership in science and technology.

"Professor Ajayan is a world-renowned expert in fabricating materials and devices based on his creative chemical and physical manipulation of carbon," said Acting Provost Robert Palazzo. "His research is unlocking information about how to direct the assembly of carbon at the atomic level, providing opportunities for the assembly of a cornucopia of carbon-based nanostructures.

ESA's Mars Express has obtained images of the Cydonia region, site of the famous 'Face on Mars.' The High Resolution Stereo Camera photos include some of the most spectacular views of the Red Planet ever.

After multiple attempts to image the Cydonia region from April 2004 until July 2006 were frustrated by altitude and atmospheric dust and haze, the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board Mars Express finally obtained, on 22 July, a series of images that show the famous 'face' on Mars in unprecedented detail.

The data were gathered during orbit 3253 over the Cydonia region, with a ground resolution of approximately 13.7 metres per pixel. Cydonia lies at approximately 40.75° North and 350.54° East.

Mosquitoes' thirst for sugar could prove to be the answer for eliminating malaria and other mosquito-transmitted diseases, says Hebrew University researcher Prof. Yosef Schlein in a study published in the American Science magazine and the International Journal for Parasitology.

How did our evolutionary ancestors make sense of their world? What strategies did they use, for example, to find food? Fossils do not preserve thoughts, so we have so far been unable to glean any insights into the cognitive structure of our ancestors.

Padana, a young female orangutan at the Leipzig Zoo, who was one of the research subjects. (Image: Knut Finstermeier, MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology)

Sacred flaming temples, gas-guzzling RVs that converge for a week on the dry Black Rock Desert lakebed - The Exxon-Mobil National Convention, you are thinking?

 Not at all. It's the Burning Man Art Festival in Nevada and it causes global warming. For 21 years this ecological disaster has been using gas-powered generators, up to 37,000 of them, so that smelly hippies can gorge themselves on wasteful fossil-fuel consumption. San Francisco scientists are unsure how much this contributes to global warming but they intend to find out. 

I've talked about this before. Not only do I think kids today are smarter than we ever were, I pretty much can't wait for them to run the world.

Nothing ... and I mean nothing ... in the corporate world compares to trying to get laid as a teenager.

And not only are kids today having sex like cocaine-fueled bunnies, they are convincing researchers they're having less of it. That, my friends, is scientific brilliance.

But there's confusion in the scientific ranks about all of this and I will tell you why; it's because teenagers are so smart they redefined sex to fool researchers so they can have more of it.

First, the data.

When kids head back to school this fall, they might have some brand new planets to memorize.  

The International Astronomical Union, currently meeting in Prague, is expected to vote on the definition of a planet. The organization, which has named planets and moons since it was founded in 1919, is debating a plan to establish that our solar system has 12 planets. 

Plant geneticists at Rutgers may have solved one of the fundamental concerns about genetically engineered or modified (GM or GMO) crop agriculture: genes leaking into the environment.

In a recent paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Rutgers Professor Pal Maliga and research associate Zora Svab advocate an alternative and more secure means of introducing genetic material into a plant. In GM crops today, novel genes are inserted into a cell nucleus but can eventually wind up in pollen grains or seeds that make their way out into the environment.