Sex helps in multiple ways, it seems.  New research presented at The Gerontological Society of America's meeting, based on 2004 General Social Surveys, found that the more often older married individuals engage in sexual activity, the more likely they are to be happy with their lives and marriages.

Based on the survey responses of 238 married individuals age 65 years or older, the research showed that frequency of sexual activity was a significant predictor of both general and marital happiness. The association even remained after accounting for factors such as age, gender, health status, and satisfaction with financial situation.

Researchers have developed what they are billing as the world’s lightest material. With a density of 0.9 mg/cc, it is about one hundred times lighter than Styrofoam™. 

The new material redefines the limits of lightweight materials because of its unique “micro-lattice” cellular architecture, they say - consists of 99.99 percent air by designing the 0.01 percent solid at the nanometer, micron and millimeter scales.  The material’s architecture allows unprecedented mechanical behavior for a metal, including complete recovery from compression exceeding 50 percent strain and extraordinarily high energy absorption.

In the first part of this look at magma chambers, I talked about some of the processes that dominate what goes on beneath an active volcano.  The twin actions of fractionation and assimilation were what preoccupied the early researchers, however more recently we've realised things are a little more complicated than that.  In this part I want to take a closer look at some of those intricacies.

Totally overshadowed by the news of the new Opera measurement of neutrino speeds, yesterday CERN officially released the combined result of ATLAS and CMS searches for the Higgs boson. The news has been given already in two prominent particle physics blogs (Resonaances and Not Even Wrong), so I think I am not obliged to do anything more than point you to those, who cover the matter quite accurately.

The development of simple tests to predict a leukemic relapse in young patients has come a step closer. Approximately 20 percent of young leukemia patients who are treated with stem cells derived from umbilical cord blood will experience leukemic relapse but new research findings published in Blood demonstrate that the blame falls partially on T cells, a subset of white blood cells. 

The researchers analyzed blood samples from young children who received an umbilical cord blood transplant for the treatment of blood disorders, including leukemia. They were particularly interested in studying the three to six month time period post-transplantation, when the children were most susceptible to both relapse and infection.

New research in Nature has a surprising conclusion; the impact of deforestation on global warming varies with latitude, which at least explains a frustrating lack of warming in the U.S. even though global warming has been measured higher overall.

The researchers calculated that north of Minnesota, or above 45 degrees latitude, deforestation was associated with an average temperature decrease of 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit. On the other hand, deforestation south of North Carolina, or below 35 degrees latitude, appeared to cause warming. Statistically insignificant cooling occurred between these two latitudes.

Turkey Day is coming, and with it, the deadline for Obama’s 12-member “Super Committee,” a group of Congress members tasked with carving $1.2 trillion off our national debt.

If the bipartisan group can even reach a deal (so far, they’ve missed their own deadline by at least ten days, flatly refused each others’ proposals and been awfully closed-lipped about possible compromises), it seems like everyone’s going to feel the pinch.

Everyone, that is, who can’t buy his or her way out of it.

Last week, the American Petroleum Institute — the notorious “Big Oil” lobby representing Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Shell and others — started running ads thanking Republican super committee members for preserving industry-specific tax breaks worth $40 billion over the next ten years.

After a more careful reading of the paper, the listening to a seminar on the result, and some discussions, I can share with you a few more details on the Opera measurement.