A natural product secreted by a soil bacterium may lead to a new drug to treat tuberculosis, report scientists in a new study. 

Pyridomycin, a natural antibiotic produced by the bacterium Dactylosporangium fulvum, has been shown to be active against many of the drug-resistant types of the tuberculosis bacterium that no longer respond to treatment with the front-line drug isoniazid.

Anti-science people with a 'natural' fetish don't understand that the random and unpredictable nature of...nature...is a bad thing.  All of the funding campaigns and Internet rants of environmentalists are only possible because scientists and engineers harnessed the power of dangerous, unpredictable nature at one point in time - we don't try to power our homes and business with all-natural lightning bolts, we instead generate electricity synthetically and we do so as safely as possible. It can still hurt you but no one is waging a campaign against electricity today.

Elsevier and SEPM (Society for Sedimentary Geology) have announced the integration of more than 18,000 geological maps from SEPM into Elsevier's web-based research tool, Geofacets. The integration grants geoscientists access to scientific information that can provide key insight into the potential of regions for oil and gas exploration, allowing geoscientists to make predictions and guide exploration with greater confidence. As a result of adding maps from SEPM, Geofacets now houses over 225,000 maps providing essential information to geoscientists. 

The latest test drive marks the final chapter in a three year long project which has seen the development of the next step in autonomous driving technology, 'vehicle platooning'. Since 2009, Volvo Car Corporation has been the driving force behind the EU funded SARTRE project (Safe Road-Trains for the Environment), bringing vehicle platooning technology one step closer to becoming a reality on Europe's roads. 

The MESSENGER spacecraft has been orbiting Mercury since March 2011 and has been revealing new information about the surface chemistry and geological history of the innermost planet in the solar system.

Weider et al. recently analyzed 205 measurements of the surface composition from MESSENGER's X-ray spectrometer, focusing on the large expanse of smooth volcanic plains at high northern latitudes and surrounding areas that are higher in crater density and therefore older than the northern plains. 

A third of UK men are so overweight they are unable to see their genitals due to a protruding midriff, so medics are encouraging men to make one potentially lifesaving resolution and weigh up their health risks.  

The worrying new research says that 33% of men in Britain aged between 35 and 60 years are unable to see their penis when standing upright and looking downwards, due to a giant belly; that increases to 44% in men aged 51-60 years. These figures highlight that more than 5.6 million men in Britain are potentially dangerously overweight, are at risk of reducing their lifespan by 9 years and of suffering from a life-threatening, weight-related illness such as stroke, diabetes and heart disease. 

The BIG check:

Like the rest of the developed world, Europe is getting a lot fatter, and public health experts in Europe have found a correlation for the upward spike in youth obesity - the low birth rate. They say only children, singletons, have a more than 50 percent higher risk of being overweight or obese than children with siblings. Over 22 million children in Europe are estimated to be overweight.

On the road to true Open Publishing, where taxpayer money isn't used to pay to publish or to read already taxpayer-funded studies at all, the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing (SCOAP) in Particle Physics has set a new waypoint, and Oxford University Press has signed up Progress of Theoretical and Experimental Physics (PTEP) for this new transparent model of open access, where members can see how the taxpayer money is being spent.  

“Our results raise important questions about our representation of tastes and flavors and could also lead to applications in the marketing of food products.”

- say a research team who have been investigating possible associations between flavors and various musical instruments. The Crossmodal Research Lab at Oxford University in the UK have presented their paper : ‘As bitter as a trombone: Synesthetic correspondences in nonsynesthetes between tastes/flavors and musical notes’ in a recent issue of the journal Attention Perception&Psychophysics.

Emotions tag our experiences and act as waypoints in how we steer our behavior, but they seem to be subjective. Avoiding danger and pursuing rewards is essential for successful navigation through a complex environment, and thus for survival, but why are some people afraid of harmless spiders yet most are not afraid of incredibly dangerous horses?

The search for the neural correlate of emotions fascinates neuroscientists and psychologists – emotions are a central part of our mental selves.