Are you on Team Quantum Dots or Team Nanowires when the topic of future nanoscale energy-harvesting technology in solar panels comes up?

10 percent of the US is left handed and that is a similar ratio to many populations around the world so it would seem to be biological.

But a new paper in the journal Heredity has ruled out a 'strong genetic determinant' in influencing handedness. 

Professor John Armour, Dr. Angus Davison (both The University of Nottingham) and Professor Chris McManus (University College London) conducted a twin study examining the whole genome of nearly 4,000 subjects from the London Twin Research Unit to compare left and right handed participants. 

Knocking on wood is a common superstition in Western culture, mostly used to prevent bad luck after talking about good fortune, but sometimes to reverse bad fortune or undo a "jinx."

Other cultures maintain similar practices, like spitting or throwing salt, after someone has tempted fate. Even people who aren't superstitious often participate in these practices.  And since this baseball playoffs start today, don't even get one of them going about their crazy superstitions and rituals. 

Because an uninterrupted sequence of fossilized pollen from flowers begins in the Early Cretaceous, approximately 140 million years ago, it is generally assumed that flowering plants first evolved around that time. 

A new study documents flowering plant-like pollen that is 100 million years older, implying that flowering plants may have originated in the Early Triassic (between 252 to 247 million years ago) or even earlier.  Flowering plants evolved from extinct plants related to conifers, ginkgos, cycads, and seed ferns.  

Here is a (partial) overview of (some of) the recent academic literature on the subject of 'Humming'

Security

Humming-based human verification and identification

“The experimental results show that linear prediction cepstral coefficients and perceptually linear prediction coefficients are conducive to verification and identification, respectively.”

Medicine

A recent article discussed the question of causation versus statistical association in cross-sectional epidemiology studies that evaluate the pote

As an Applied Mathematician, I like to use mathematical modeling and computational techniques to try to better understand how things work in the world around me. One application I have studied over a number of years is how to compute the number of runs (and their distribution) for a team of baseball players with realistic data.

In Antarctica's Vestfold Hills, Deep Lake has been isolated from the ocean for the last 3,500 years ago, a result of Antarctic continent rising that has left a saltwater ecosystem that remains liquid, even in extreme cold.

Concerns about the negative effects of mercury on fetal development have led to
the US National Research Council
warning against eating too much fish during pregnancy, but those guidelines may need to be reviewed.

New research instead found that fish accounts for only seven percent of mercury levels in the human body. Further, an analysis of 103 food and drink items consumed by 4,484 women during pregnancy found that the 103 items together accounted for less than 17 percent of total mercury levels in the body. 

Disrupted sleep patterns have been linked to autism but the quality of the evidence accumulated to date has often been compromised by small sample size, lack of agreed definitions, and poor comparability of study participants.

Some data also suggest that production of the sleep hormone melatonin may be impaired in some children with autistic spectrum disorders, which may explain disturbed sleep patterns, say the authors of a new paper.

But it's unclear just what impact this shortened sleep pattern may have, they acknowledge, though other researchers have suggested that sleep loss may have impact on neuronal development.