In the ongoing struggle between the Representative of the 21st District of Texas, Lamar Smith, and all that is holy about the peer review grant process, the battle lines are getting clearer.

Finally the decay of Higgs bosons to b-quark pairs is emerging from LHC data, too.

 4C+29.30, a galaxy located some 850 million light years from Earth, has a new composite image which shows how the intense gravity of a supermassive black hole can be tapped to generate immense power.

 This multi-wavelength view reveals that the radio emission of 4C+29.30 comes from two jets of particles that are speeding at millions of miles per hour away from a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. The estimated mass of the black hole is about 100 million times the mass of our Sun. The ends of the jets show larger areas of radio emission located outside the galaxy. 

An analysis of 4,000 abstracts of peer-reviewed articles on the topic of global warming and climate change has revealed an overwhelming consensus among climate scientists that recent warming is human-caused.

There's no awareness issue in climate change - almost no one on the planet hasn't heard of it or lacks an opinion.

62% of Americans believe global warming is happening - which means 38% do not. Like evolution or anti-science beliefs about genetic modification and vaccines and autism, the majority may fall along particular cultural lines but acceptance is still a problem that defies easy categorization and stereotypes. Yet framing and deficit thinking have all been tried, and they have made the problem worse. Instead of leading to more science acceptance, opinion on the climate now goes up and down with media reports about the weather.

A year after the 2009 human H1N1 pandemic began, researchers detected the H1N1 virus in free-ranging northern elephant seals off the central California coast. It is the first report of that flu strain in any marine mammal.

H1N1 originated in pigs. It emerged in humans in 2009, spreading worldwide as a pandemic. The World Health Organization now considers the H1N1 strain from 2009 to be under control, taking on the behavior of a seasonal virus.

Over the past few years, demand from the surveillance market and huge spending by governments across the globe on biometric technologies has caused the facial recognition technology market to become more accurate, less costly and significantly more mainstream.

More accurate technology and the brighter economic future it can bring has led to more traction and investment from the commercial sector. The development of 3-D face recognition technology, backed by improved imaging solutions like middleware and fast analytics, has helped the technology to overcome its traditional flaws such as poor results in low lights, pose variation and image reconstruction 

Some people believe the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a small, unified body composed of the best scientists who make proclamations on lots of things.

That isn't really true. The actual IPCC is a tiny UN group, around a dozen people, but the bulk of the data is compiled by unpaid (well, unpaid by the UN) scientists who participate in working groups that argue over the science - it is not without some flaws. They use geographical and gender parameters for participation so a working group may not have the best scientists in the world, some will have been chosen because they needed to meet a cultural quota - and they still get to be heard. 

Temperatures in central China are 10 to 14 degrees Fahrenheit hotter today than they were 20,000 years ago - an increase two to four times greater than many scientists previously thought.  

If you are physically strong, social science scholars believe they can predict whether or not you are more conservative than other men.

This might seem obvious. Fitness takes a lot of individual initiative, the government can do all of the outreach programs and legislate all of the soda cups they want, but it won't make people exercise. Super-fit people have to be conservative when it comes to their own exercise, even if they are liberal about money. 

Michael Bang Petersen, associate professor in the Department of Political Science and Government at Aarhus University, and evolutionary psychology colleagues at UC Santa Barbara say the strength/politics connection is due to evolution, which is sure to annoy biologists.