Five years ago, Edith had a problem: Her goldfish of 25 years, Mr. Fish, had dropsy, a disease characterized by a swollen or hollow abdomen and in most cases fatal. In her last attempt to save her pet, on a whim, Edith wrote a message on GoldfishConnection asking for help.

Rick G. Copeland, the specialist at the goldfish site, recommended some Medi-Gold pellets. Two years later, at age 27, Mr. Fish swam around his tank as if his close call with death never happened.

Mr. Fish may not have the 49 year-old record of the oldest goldfish ever, but he's working on it. In the meantime, Mr. Fish is competing with the millions of other pet goldfish around the world.

Was Hippasus pushed? If you are even mildly interested in the history of mathematics, it is likely that you will have heard something like the following story. The Pythagoreans (who were also into music in a big way) worshipped numbers, and believed them to be the basis of everything. If one were to do a modern caricature of this, it might go:

  Do you believe in Rock ’n’ Roll?
  Can mathematics save your soul?

By numbers, they meant whole numbers or positive integers. Whether this included ‘one’ is a moot point, because later Greek mathematicians regarded ‘one’ as the ‘generator of numbers’. One day, a man called Hippasus discovered that the square root of 2 was irrational. This went so much against the Pythagorean world view that they took him out to sea and threw him overboard. It didn’t stop there, though.

Conservation zones, or 'No-take areas' (NTAs), that were set up to protect fish in the late 1960s and early 1970s are in the wrong place to protect vulnerable coral reefs from the effects of global warming, an international team of scientists warned today.

Now the team, led jointly by Newcastle University and the Wildlife Conservation Society, say that urgent action is needed to prevent the collapse of this important marine ecosystem.

The research is the largest study of its kind to have been carried out, covering 66 sites across seven countries and spanning over a decade in the Indian Ocean.

Contrary to stereotypes about masculinity, men interviewed in a large international study reported that being seen as honorable, self-reliant and respected was more important to their idea of masculinity than being seen as attractive, sexually active or successful with women.

The study published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine included interviews with more than 27,000 randomly selected men from eight countries (Germany, U.S., U.K., Spain, Brazil, Mexico, Italy and France), with about 16 percent of the men reporting erectile problems.

Regardless of age or nationality, the men more frequently ranked good health, harmonious family life and good relationships with their wife or partner as more important to their quality of life than material, self-fulfilling or purely sexual concerns. There was no significant difference in rankings of masculinity and quality of life characteristics between men who experienced erectile dysfunction and those who did not.

Do babies says "mama" and "papa" because they recognize their parents or did those words become terms for parents because that's what babies first say?

The human brain may be hard-wired to recognize certain repetition patterns, according to a study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Using the latest optical brain imaging techniques, University of British Columbia post-doctoral fellow Judit Gervain and a team of researchers from Italy and Chile documented brain activities of 22 newborns (2-3 days old) when exposed to recordings of made-up words.

How do galaxies form? The most widely accepted answer to this fundamental question is the model of 'hierarchical formation', a step-wise process in which small galaxies merge to build larger ones. One can think of the galaxies forming in a similar way to how streams merge to form rivers, and how these rivers, in turn, merge to form an even larger river.

This theoretical model predicts that massive galaxies grow through many merging events in their lifetime. But when did their cosmological growth spurts finish? When did the most massive galaxies get most of their mass?

Hydrogen will be one of the most important fuels of the future, if it can be obtained by efficiently splitting water. Today the electrolysis of water is a very energy intensive process, making it both expensive and unsustainable if the electricity necessary to generate it comes from the burning of fossil fuels anyway.

Photolysis, the splitting of water by light, is a highly promising alternative. A team of Australian and American researchers has now developed a catalyst that effectively catalyzes one of the necessary half reactions, the photooxidation of water. As it reports in the journal Angewandte Chemie, the core of the catalyst is a manganese-containing complex modeled after those found in photosynthetic organisms.

A new study from researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University sheds light on why smokers' intentions to quit “cold turkey” often fizzle out within days or even hours.

If a smoker isn't yearning for a cigarette when he makes the decision to kick the habit-and most aren't-he isn't able to foresee how he will feel when he's in need of a nicotine buzz.

Published in the September issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, the study, “Exploring the Cold-to-Hot Empathy Gap in Smokers,” bolsters the theory that smokers not in a state of craving a cigarette will underestimate and underpredict the intensity of their future urge to smoke.

Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) did not become extinct because they were less intelligent than our ancestors (Homo sapiens), says a research team that has shown that early stone tool technologies developed by our species, Homo sapiens, were no more efficient than those used by Neanderthals.

They say their discovery debunks a textbook belief held by archaeologists for more than 60 years.

The team spent three years flintknapping (producing stone tools). They recreated stone tools known as 'flakes,' which were wider tools originally used by both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, and 'blades,' a narrower stone tool later adopted by Homo sapiens. Archaeologists often use the development of stone blades and their assumed efficiency as proof of Homo sapiens' superior intellect. To test this, the team analysed the data to compare the number of tools produced, how much cutting-edge was created, the efficiency in consuming raw material and how long tools lasted.

Is sleep essential? The answer seems obvious, since we all have to do it, but to a sleep scientist, the question of what constitutes sleep is so complex that scientists are still trying to define the essential function of something we do every night.

The search for the core function of sleep can seem as elusive as the search for the mythological phoenix, says Chiara Cirelli, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison.

Some scientists argue that sleep is merely a way to impose a quiet, immobile state (rest), and isn't important by itself in mammals and birds. This is the so-called "null hypothesis," and Cirelli and co-author Giulio Tononi reject it.