According to a new study in Social Psychology Quarterly, the higher your IQ the more likely you are to be a liberal and an atheist. The author says this is because more intelligent people exhibit social values and political preferences that are novel to the human species in evolutionary history--mainly, liberalism and atheism.

The study advances a new theory to explain why people form particular preferences and values. The theory suggests that more intelligent people are more likely than less intelligent people to adopt evolutionarily novel preferences and values, but intelligence does not correlate with preferences and values that are old enough to have been shaped by evolution over millions of years."

Researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland have found that the reward centers in the human brain respond more strongly when a poor person receives a financial reward than when a rich person does. This activity pattern holds true even if the brain being looked at is in the rich person's head, rather than the poor person's.

The significance? The human brain is a big believer in equality, the scientists say. Their results are detailed in a new study appearing in Nature.

Many scientists warn that with a changing climate there's a good chance that forest fires in the Pacific Northwest will become larger and more frequent – and according to one expert, that's just fine.

The future of fire in this region is difficult to predict, will always be variable, and undoubtedly a part of the future landscape. People should understand, however, that fire is not only inevitable but also a valuable part of forest ecosystems and their management, says John Bailey, an associate professor in the Department of Forest Engineering, Resources and Management at Oregon State University.

One of the few physics measurements that the LHC experiments are already in the position of producing, with the week-worth of proton-proton collision data they have collected last December, is that of the Bose-Einstein intereference between identical bosons.

Who's Ernesto Di Mauro? He is Professor of Molecular Biology at the Department of Genetics and Molecular Biology, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. I caught his recent research in The Journal of Biological Chemistry, which "publishes papers based on original research that are judged to make a novel and important contribution to understanding the molecular and cellular basis of biological processes." Here are two recent abstracts by Di Mauro and colleagues. (1)

IT arrived. With little fanfare, an ordinary cardboard box full of packing peanuts has thrown my life into panic and confusion. For the mighty packing slip says it all. "Parts&Packing List". Inside is... a piece of paper. And, hopefully, buried under the packing peanuts, also a satellite.



My satellite. My InterOrbital pico-satellite. "Project Calliope", the satellite. The THING I'm BUILDING in my BASEMENT (dum-dum-dah-dum!). Did you ever wonder just what a satellite is made of? The answer is... this!

Abu Ali al-Hussein Ibn Sina famous with the name of Avicenna, was born in Persia in the 
980 at Qishlak Afshona, near Bukhara, Uzbekistan. By the age of eighteen years, possessor of an 
immensest philosophical-scientific culture, undertakes the doctor profession. Avicenna was 
studious of Hippocrates and Galen therefore developed the theory of four humors and the 
derived complexions. Avicenna is also known to fuse philosophy and medicine all in one. 
Follower of Aristotle and Plato, its infuence on the western medicine was enormous, 
especially through a work that became soon one of the medicine books more used in the 

Biologists from the American Museum of Natural History and the City University of New York have found that grizzly bears are roaming into what was traditionally thought of as polar bear habitat, the Canadian province of Manitoba, where they are officially listed as extirpated. The preliminary findings were published in Canadian Field Naturalist and show that sightings of Ursus arctos horribilis in Canada's Wapusk National Park are recent and appear to be increasing in frequency.

A team of paleontologists has discovered a new dinosaur species which belongs to the  same group of gigantic, long-necked, long-tailed, four-legged, plant-eating sauropods as Brachiosaurus. The new species has been dubbed 'Abydosaurus', and its discovery will be detailed in an upcoming issue of Naturwissenshaften.

The fossils were excavated from the Cedar Mountain Formation in Dinosaur National Monument near Vernal, Utah. The team recovered four heads – two still fully intact – from a quarry in Dinosaur National Monument in eastern Utah. Complete skulls have been recovered for only eight of more than 120 known varieties of sauropod.

In order to determine if there is cancer in the lymph nodes, pathologists must currently perform several  detailed, time-consuming tests. But University of Missouri researchers have developed a laser-induced ultrasound, called the photoacoustic method, that may help doctors locate the general area of the lymph node where melanoma cells are residing with much more efficiency than is currently possible. The new approach is detailed in the Journal of Biomedical Engineering.