A new high resolution temperature map and images of Saturn's moon Mimas have revealed surprising patterns on the surface of the small moon, including unexpected hot regions that resemble "Pac-Man" eating a dot, and striking bands of light and dark in crater walls.

The new images were collected by NASA's Cassini spacecraft on Feb. 13, during its closest flyby of the moon, which is marked by an enormous scar called Herschel Crater and resembles the Death Star from "Star Wars."

What does it mean to be human? In the six million years or so since our ancestors first stood upright, we still don't have the perfect answer. In an effort to help the public appreciate our own unique development as human beings and explore the question for themselves, the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History opened the David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins.

The exhibit hall "offers visitors an immersive, interactive journey through 6 million years of scientific evidence for human origins and the stories of survival and extinction in our family tree during times of dramatic climate instability," the Smithsonian says. I had the fortune to visit the exhibit this weekend; if you're in D.C.¹ in the future, I strongly recommend you check it out.

We are on. This afternoon just after 1PM the LHC beams have started to produce proton-proton collisions in the heart of the experiments, at the never-before achieved energy of 7 TeV.

It was a long journey to get here -the project is twenty years old- but this is just the start of a new, more exciting one: In the course of the next two years, the Large Hadron Collider will gradually increase its power, allowing the CMS and ATLAS detectors to collect enough data to significantly extend into discovery territory.

How much is my labor on the Project Calliope satellite costing me? Accounts range from 'zero' to $14,400, to $65,000. That's the difference between what I'm being paid to do it for, what I'm losing, and what I could potentially be making for the time I'm putting into this project.

The valuation of volunteer labor is currently $20 per hour. Opportunity cost is defined as the 'cost of an alternative that must be forgone in order to pursue a different action'. So if it takes me 4 hours to read a novel, is that an $80 book?

Prosopagnosia or prosopagnosia, is a perceptual deficit acquired or congenital central nervous system that prevents individuals who are affected to properly recognize people's faces, it is determined by a damaged area of the brain to the task, turn fusiform.

It was studied thoroughly in the eighteenth century by several scientists, including John Hughlings Jackson and Jean Martin Charcot. 

Researchers studying the health information content of Twitter updates say misunderstandings about antibiotics have the potential to spread widely through social networking sites.

Writing in the American Journal of Infection Control, they stress that because health information is shared extensively on such networks, it is important for health care professionals to have a basic familiarity with social networking media services, such as Twitter.

Most obesity research focuses on what kinds of foods people eat and how much. But a news study from the University of Alabama suggests that timing may be equally important when it comes maintaining a healthy weight and avoiding metabolic syndrome.

Published in the International Journal of Obesity, the study examined the influence exerted by the type of foods and specific timing of intake on the development of metabolic syndrome characteristics in mice. The research revealed that mice fed a meal higher in fat after waking had normal metabolic profiles.

Just one small square of chocolate a day can lower your blood pressure and reduce your risk of heart disease, says a new study published online today in the European Heart Journal.

The authors of the study believe that flavanols in cocoa may be the reason why chocolate seems to be good for people's blood pressure and heart health; and since there is more cocoa in dark chocolate, dark chocolate may have a greater effect.

Marketing experts say advertising that touts head-scratching scientific ingredients or other such "puffery" only an expert could appreciate is likely to alienate informed consumers.

The findings show that consumers filter ad claims, rather than accepting them blindly. As a result, the authors say, effective advertising should relate to consumers on a personal level, rather than talking down to them.

Based on a study that gauged consumer reaction to technical, tough-to-decipher advertising claims, researchers say consumers become immediately suspicious when they see or hear information they perceive as useless. The result often is a loss of trust, and maintaining trust is very important in advertising, the study explains.

Researchers from Jena University in Germany say it is not only painful memories and associations that put our pain memory on alert, words can do the trick as well.

"Even verbal stimuli lead to reactions in certain areas of the brain", says Dr. Thomas Weiss from the Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena. As soon as we hear words like "tormenting", "gruelling" or "plaguing", those areas in the brain are being activated which process the corresponding pain.