You have decided to start a graduate study in physics. Where should you apply? And how to decide which offer to take?

A diarrhea of lists attempt to rank "the world’s best universities". Mostly these lists are based on some aggregate of different metrics. Yet, for a postgraduate degree your focus should be on one and only one metric: you want to surround yourself with the best brains. If you're good, the place to hone your skills is there where you get the opportunity to learn from the best. There where you can join those that are making impact in their field of research.

What are the high-impact universities in physics?

What group has above average interest in systems and scores below average in empathy?

If you answered autistic people, you are correct. If you answered girls with anorexia, also correct.

Girls with anorexia nervosa show a mild echo of the characteristics of autism, suggests new research. At first glance, anorexia and autism seem very different, but they both share certain features, such as rigid attitudes and behaviours, a tendency to be very self-focussed, and a fascination with detail. Both conditions also share similar alterations in structure and function of brain regions involved in social perception.

I wrote before about the controversy involving the release earlier this year of a genome sequence of the HeLa cell line, which was taken without consent from Henrietta Lacks as she lay dying of ovarian cancer in 1950s Baltimore.

Now, the NIH has announced an agreement with Lacks’ descendants to obtain their consent for access to and use of the HeLa genome (the agreement applies only to NIH funded research, but the hope is that others will agree to it as well).

When I think of cheap knock-offs I think of things like a Rolex watch or a Gucci handbag, but apparently knock-off food is a $10-15 billion industry.

I don't even mean the faux organic stuff sold as such because some shell company in China claims it is organic and no one bothers to test it, actual food in real supermarkets is sometimes fake, or at least misleading, according to Shaun Kennedy, associate professor of veterinary population medicine at the University of Minnesota Director of the National Center for Food Protection and Defense.

A young child buried in the medieval town of Ribe in Denmark 800 years ago had an unpleasant life even before that - because the child had been given a large dose of mercury in an attempt to cure a severe, ongoing illness. 

A new methodology developed by chemist Kaare Lund Rasmussen from University of Southern Denmark and colleagues can reveal an unprecedented amount of details about the time even shortly before a person's death. Mercury is of particular interest for the archaeologists as many cultures in different part of the world have been in contact with the rare (and toxic) element.

There is a phenomenon in speech called coarticulation, in which certain sounds are produced differently depending on the sounds that come before or after them.

For example, though the letter n is usually pronounced with the tongue pressed near the middle of the mouth's roof (as in the word "ten") but it's pronounced with the tongue forward when it's followed by a –th, as in tenth).

A decade ago, researchers discovered that coarticulation extends to a different kind of communication - American Sign Language. Knowing that hand movements could be affected according to where they fit in during sign language, researchers wondered if there was a similar effect on hands when they were used to produce sound, such as playing the piano. 

Surveys show that people have less empathy for battered human adults than they do dogs, according to a paper at the American Sociological Association.

Jack Levin  and Arnold Arluke, sociology professors at Northeastern University, used the opinions of 240 men and women, most of whom were white and between the ages of 18-25 (college students), at a large northeastern university (guess which one) who randomly received one of four fictional news articles about; the beating of a one-year-old child, an adult in his thirties, a puppy, or a 6-year-old dog. The stories were identical except for the victim's identify. After reading their story, respondents were asked to rate their feelings of empathy towards the victim.

Do you remember the X(3872) ? This is a hadron containing charm and anticharm quarks, which was observed to decay into a J/Psi meson, a positive, and a negative pion. When it was discovered, by the Belle experiment in 2003, the X caused a lot of interest among spectroscopists, because it is an "exotic" charmonium state: its nature is not totally clear, as it might be interpreted as a "molecule" of two charmed mesons loosely bound together. Or maybe a four-quark system ? Or just conventional charmonium, a bit at odds with the expected set of spin-parity states but otherwise just a honest meson ?

Cocaine use may cause profound metabolic changes which can result in dramatic weight gain during recovery, a distressing phenomenon that can lead to relapse - the reason is because chronic cocaine use may reduce the body's ability to store fat, the authors of a new paper suggest.

It is widely believed that cocaine suppresses the appetite and that the problematic weight gain during rehabilitation was a result of patients substituting food for drugs. 

Two weeks ago, Galveston born and raised George P. Mitchell passed away at age 94. He was well-known as a Texas oil billionaire but less well-known as a keen advocate of science.