I always wondered why research findings funded by tax dollars are freely available to pharma companies to make big bucks.

It is a vicious cycle. It starts from taxpayer funding research projects that culminate in publishing papers. And It ends in pharmaceutical companies selling products/drugs designed based on same research findings. Unfortunately, the general public pays for both, and my question is, why should they?

A company, when using research findings from a publicly funded project, should pay for it.

A group of scientists say they have conducted a comprehensive study of how different body measurements correspond with ratings of female attractiveness.

Even across cultural divides, women who are young, tall and long armed were considered the most attractive, they found, to little surprise.

According to the researchers, traditional studies of attractiveness used a natural selection framework - an individual will always choose the best possible mate that circumstances will allow (romance of the fitter?).   Those studies focused on torso, waist, bust and hip measurements.

In the Houston-Galveston Coastal Subsidence District, a group of researchers have found that a large section of northwestern Harris County, particularly the Jersey Village area, is sinking rapidly.  They analyzed a decade's worth of GPS data measuring ground elevation in the Houston area and found that some points in Jersey Village are subsiding by up to 5.5 centimeters (about 2 inches) a year.

A semiconductor material called gallium manganese arsenide has been shown to have an interesting new effect that converts heat into a quantum mechanical phenomenon – known as spin – in a semiconductor.   If developed, the effect could enable integrated circuits that run on heat, rather than electricity.

This research merges two new technologies, thermo-electricity and spintronics.   Researchers around the world are working to develop electronics that utilize the spin of electrons to read and write data - desirable because in principle they could store more data in less space, process data faster and consume less power.

Climate science is in a difficult position.   On the one side, climate scientists like James Hansen say that the data behind IPCC media talking points is too easy to misinterpret so people shouldn't have it, but to hard science people, climate science accuracy, in the science data sense, is far too inaccurate for claims that its people make.    No one in physics could get away with the accuracy levels climate scientists regard as settled.

A week from now, Tuesday October 5th, the winner(s) of the 2010 Nobel Prize for physics will be announced. Predicting the Nobel laureates in physics is notoriously difficult. As part of their overall Nobel prize predictions, each year Thomson Reuters attempts to predict the winners in physics, but despite their habit of listing multiple candidates, so far they never managed to hit any of the annual winner(s).

This year Thomson Reuters might, for the first time, be lucky.

Pickering is quite a name in the philosophy of science, or science studies, sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), or science and technology studies (STS).

He is especially interested in physics and writes about so called “old” versus “new” science.  He means and to this day insists on the difference being soft versus hard scattering in particle collider experiments, the latter being something that happened around the time he started to look into physics more than 30 years ago (oh coincidence).

A new study says sodium nitrate, like you get if you eat plenty of vegetables, reverses features of metabolic syndrome in mice.   

Metabolic syndrome is the list of risk factors of metabolic origin that increase likelihood of getting cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes.

As obesity has increased, and the number of people with metabolic syndrome right along with it, various attempts have been made to identify a common underlying molecular mechanism for metabolic syndrome.   One group has pointed to a defect in endogenous synthesis and bioavailability of nitric oxide (NO) and their new study says one contributing issue in metabolic syndrome is a decrease in the amount of nitric oxide from endothelial NO synthase (eNOS).

We know people have positive social behavior in part because of emotional reactions to real or imagined social harm  - we may not like seeing others slighted or we may not want to be perceived as the kind of person who does that sort of thing.

But some are a lot more sensitive than others and a new study says that the neurotransmitter serotonin can directly alter both moral judgment and behavior through increasing our aversion to personally harming others, rather than just controlling violent impulses or helping you sleep.

Ronald Fisher, evolutionary biologist and statistician who introduced the method of maximum likelihood and the fiducial interval into life sciences, said basically that the more complex a plant or animal is, the more difficulty it should have adapting to changes in the environment. 

But there are well-adapted, complex organisms, orchids, humans, you name it, and confusion about 'cost of complexity' offers ammunition to proponents of Creationism, who hold that  intricacy could only arise only through the efforts of a divine designer and not natural selection.