The Associated Press, that bastion of scientific knowledge, shares with us a list of "pests that are benefiting or could benefit from global warming", starting with:

_Ticks that transmit Lyme disease are spreading northward into Sweden and Canada, once too cold for them.
_Giant Humboldt squid have reached waters as far north as British Columbia,
threatening fisheries along much of the western North American coast.

No one draws pictures of heads with little gears or hydraulics inside any more. The modern conceptualization of the brain is firmly computational. The brain may be wet, squooshy, and easy to serve with an ice cream scooper, but it is nevertheless a computer. 


However, there is a rather blaring difficulty with this view, and it is encapsulated in the following question: If our brains are computers, why doesn’t size matter? In the real world of computers, bigger tends to mean smarter. But this is not the case for animals: bigger brains are not generally smarter. Most of the brain size differences across mammals seem to make no behavioral difference at all to the animal.

The metric system rocks, right? And that's because it's an organic system of measure, derived directly from the circumference of the earth, right? And hasn't been subject to any malingering, gerrymandering, finagling or other debased punking by dirty human hands, right? Um, not exactly.

Last May the CDF collaboration published their observation of the  baryon, a particle made by a very exotic "bss" quark triplet. The CDF result came almost one year after a similar measurement was published by the competitor experiment, D0.

Despite widespread educational efforts aimed at helping the public make healthy choices, it's understood among experts that people often fail to comply with the advice offered by their doctors and others in the health community.

To correct this deficiency in compliance, some researchers are now proposing that text messaging be used to send out health tips to consumers. Given it's popularity and low expense, they say,  regular text messaging may be just the thing to prompt people to make behavioral changes for the sake of health

A potentially dangerous level of carbon dioxide and methane gas haunts Lake Kivu, the freshwater lake system bordering Rwanda and the Republic of Congo.

Scientists can't say for sure if the volatile mixture at the bottom of the lake will remain still for another 1,000 years or someday explode without warning. In a region prone to volcanic and seismic activity, the fragility of Lake Kivu is a serious matter. Compounding the precarious situation is the presence of approximately 2 million people, many of them refugees, living along the north end of the lake.

Psychologists earlier this month confirmed what most parents likely already know about their  teenage children. The more they're involved in their kids' lives (Specifically, by knowing where their children are, who they're with and what they're doing), the less likely it is they will engage in illicit behavior--like smoking marijuana.

People associate all kinds of physical features with good health; a slim waistline, full head of hair, and chiseled abs are all typical examples. Now researchers are suggesting that another feature may tell an awful lot about a person's health--their skin color.

With the publication of a new study in the International Journal of Primatology, a team of scientists say that the color of a person's skin affects how healthy and therefore attractive they appear, and have found that diet may be crucial to achieving the most desirable complexion.

If you don't think there's anything to learn by observing a bunch of drunk college students while they watch football and yell at the TV, you're missing out on a valuable cultural lesson.

By studying the emotional reactions of college football fans to their favorite teams' on-field performances, communication experts say they have gained important insights into the relationship between entertainment and human emotion.

Ohio State University researchers studied fans of two college football teams as they watched the teams' annual rivalry game on television. They found that fans of the winning team who, at some point during the game, were almost certain their team would lose, ended up thinking the game was the most thrilling and suspenseful.