Listen to science instead of Tiger Woods on golf? Sheer madness.

But golfers who heed the advice of instructors to keep their heads perfectly still while putting may be hampering their game, according to a study in the July issue of the Journal of Motor Behavior that examined coordination patterns.

Tim Lee, professor of kinesiology at McMaster University and a golfer himself, says the findings run contrary to conventional wisdom, or at least conventional golf wisdom.
 

The putting stroke is used more frequently than any other during a round of golf, regardless of skill. In 2007, putts represented 41.3 per cent of total strokes taken by members of the PGA tour, and 40 percent for members of the LPGA.

Israelis and Palestinians working together? Indeed, when it comes to combating tuberculosis.

Tuberculosis - or TB - is a deadly infectious bacterial disease that usually attacks the lungs. Acknowledged as a disease of crowds, it is transmitted from human to human living in close contact.

Dating back thousands of years, tuberculosis was well known in antiquity. However, according to Spigelman, it is still the biggest killer even today. One-third of the world's current population has been infected by tuberculosis, resulting, in recent years, in approximately three million deaths per year.

Plant sterols have been touted as an effective way to lower cholesterol and reduce the risk of heart disease. However, a research study in the July JLR has uncovered that these compounds do have their own risks, as they can accumulate in heart valves and lead to stenosis.

Aortic valve stenosis (AS) results from cholesterol accumulation in the valve between the left ventricle and aorta; this impedes the flow of blood and puts extra pressure on the heart. About 2% of individuals over 65 (and over 5% of those over 85) have AS, and as the population ages, it is becoming an increasing problem.

Plant sterols can block the absorption of dietary cholesterol into the body, and as such high vegetable diets and/or plant sterol supplements are often used to alleviate high cholesterol. However, although plant sterols themselves are poorly absorbed, they can enter the body, so Satu Helske and colleagues examined whether plant sterols can also accumulate in aortic valves.

In the quest to find the biological route of drug addiction, research at Cambridge University, UK, is revealing what makes some people more vulnerable than others. Speaking at Europe’s major neuroscience conference in Geneva today, Professor Barry Everitt described what they now believe causes the switch from occasional, ‘recreational’ use to a compulsive habit.

Professor Everitt and researchers in the Cambridge lab have discovered there is a shift in the control of drug seeking behaviour in the brain. Taking drugs – for example, cocaine – generates reinforcing or ‘rewarding’ effects mediated by the ventral striatum of the brain. In some people, however, drug taking escalates to become a strong habit, difficult to relinquish, and which is eventually controlled by the dorsal striatum, a region of the brain associated with habit learning.

If you've said you're going to 'sleep on it' in regards to a difficult decision, you know it became a cliche' for a reason - it often works. Swiss scientists have discovered that sleep can have lasting consequences on brain function by stimulating new brain connections that strengthen the learning processes and directly influence our actions.

Speaking at the Forum of European Neuroscience, Dr. Sophie Schwartz from the University of Geneva explained that any new experience is encoded in memory, but memory traces can later be forgotten or become more stable and permanent. Among the numerous factors that can affect the fate of memory traces, sleep seems to play a critical role.

The topic of gender in science has been a hot one this decade. While women have equal representation in biology and an overwhelming majority in social sciences, they are lacking in the hard sciences and sparse at the professor level.

Germany has implented "Research oriented gender equality standards“, which have been developed by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) and have now been adopted by the General Assembly of the DFG in Berlin.

For the first time, researchers have taken a detailed look at what lies beneath all of Iceland's volcanoes – and found a world far more complex than they ever imagined.

They mapped an elaborate maze of magma chambers - work that could one day help scientists better understand how earthquakes and volcanic eruptions occur in Iceland and elsewhere in the world.

Knowing where magma chambers are located is a key first step to understanding the chemical composition of the molten rock that is flowing within them - and of the gases that are released when a volcano erupts, explained Daniel Kelley, doctoral student in earth sciences at Ohio State University.

Sociologist Ching Kwan Lee, a sociologist at the University of California-Los Angeles, writes in the summer issue of the American Sociological Association's Contexts magazine that there is a 'quiet revolution' happening among citizens of China that isn't recognized by the louder human rights activists.

In contrast to traditional activism appealing to universal notions of human rights, this grassroots movement among everyday people in China invokes "the protection of lawful rights," or weiquan. This activism focuses on specific rights prescribed by Chinese law, such as labor, property and rural land rights.

According to Lee, growing unrest over social injustice, as well as wealth and power gaps in Chinese society—due to the country's rapid economic development—has led to three decades of market reform and legal proliferation by the central government in Beijing.

A new pathway for methane formation in the oceans has been discovered, with significant potential for advancing our understanding of greenhouse gas production on Earth, scientists believe.

A paper on the findings published in Nature Geoscience reveals that decomposition of a phosphorus-containing compound called methylphosphonate may be responsible for an unexpected supersaturation of methane in the oceans' oxygen-rich surface waters.

Through the National Science Foundation (NSF) Center for Microbial Oceanography: Research and Education (C-MORE), oceanographer David Karl of the University of Hawaii and microbiologist Edward DeLong of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, co-authors of the Nature Geoscience paper, are working to learn how and when microbes turn on and off their methane production genes in response to methane precursors like methylphosphonate.

Nothing knows how to survive changes on Earth like bacteria. Microorganisms once reigned supreme on the Earth and they thrived by filling every nook and cranny of the environment billions of years before humans first arrived on the scene.

Their ability to grow from an almost infinite variety of food sources may help bail out society from its current energy crisis, according to the Arizona State University Biodesign Institute's Bruce Rittmann, Rosa Krajmalnik-Brown, and Rolf Halden.

Two distinct, but complementary approaches will be needed: