Higher education has helped women narrow the wage gap but there is one college-related factor that has becoming increasingly important in perpetuating that gap, according to new research.

And that factor is their college major.   Women dominate the social sciences, for example, so by not moving more into hard sciences, the numbers are not normalizing across all fields.   Women at the higher levels of research and in disciplines like engineering show no modern wage gap.

Americans go to church less but the rate of departure previously reported may have been incorrect, according to sociologists Michael Hout and Claude S. Fischer of the University of California, Berkeley.

According to the new data, 93 percent of Americans believe in God, a figure unchanged since 1988. The group that increased was the group Hout and Fischer call "unchurched believers," those people who believe in God but report no religion. 

A new paper outlines what it calls a simple-to-use technique which enables companies to optimize the performance of industrial boilers and reduce their main emissions.

It's about time.   

Obviously there aren't going to be any new super-efficient combustion techniques any time soon -   combustion is what it is - but using a new oxidation method with an improved catalyst is a different story.   

A catalyst is a substance which increases the speed of chemical reactions, without taking any apparent part in the reaction, or which modifies the parameters of the reaction (temperature, pressure, concentration, etc.).  In the case of catalytic combustion, the main parameter is its speed of reaction given by the equation for the speed of the flame front UL:

When it comes to how they raise their children, mothers do things the way their mothers did, according to a new study that looked at parenting practices across two generations.

Fathers don't seem to use their moms as parenting role models despite the fact that the fathers studied were raised more by their mothers, even in a changing workplace environment.

Obviously, fathers may have been more influenced by their dads rather than their moms, but the surveys used by the study didn't examine their fathers' behavior,  said Jonathan Vespa, co-author of the study and doctoral student in sociology at Ohio State.

If you’re serious about pursuing an extended education in science, you may want to set your sights on one of the U.S. campuses that have been identified as having the best science graduate programs. In April, US News&World Report released the results of their 3-year study that ranked the best science schools in the nation.

One of the current questions for the future of space exploration is whether to return to the moon, or just head to Mars.

Should we return somewhere we’ve been before? Or just strike out toward someplace totally new? Is there any benefit to going back to the moon? Can we make it to Mars without building up our endurance and scientific knowledge on the moon first?

There are intelligent, well-connected, even famous, proponents on both sides.

I have often found reference to medieval and early modern folks most helpful in debugging things that have bugged me since I did science when I was a student in the Sixties (for me they did not swing). One particular bunch are the Oxford Calculators, also known as the Merton scholars. As the Wikipedia article states:

The Principle of Maximal Aging - Capturing the Essence of Relativity

The hunt for dark energy is on and ways to find it, such as weak gravitational lensing and baryon acoustic oscillation, hold great promise but are as yet unproven.   Supernovae studies, which depend on measuring the redshift and brightness of distant Type Ia supernovae, are the most reliable.

Cats have a reputation for being smart but dogs deserve more respect, says canine researcher Stanley Coren, PhD, of the University of British Columbia, who spoke on dog psychology (seriously) today on the topic “How Dogs Think” at the American Psychological Association’s 117th Annual Convention.

They can also understand more than 150 words and intentionally deceive other dogs and people to get treats,  Coren says. He is the author of more than a half-dozen popular books on dogs and dog behavior, and reviewed numerous studies to conclude that dogs have the ability to solve complex problems and are more like humans and other higher primates than previously thought.