Discussions about science and, to a less extent medicine, often involve optimizing its representation. Various fields discuss how to increase gender or racial parity, while political and handicapped representation is dismissed as choice or even competence.

The high power needed to cut or weld using a laser beam creates its own problem: the beam’s energy deforms the mirrors that focus it. When that happens, the beam expands and loses intensity.

A new type of mirror is being presented at the Optatec trade fair in Frankfurt next week - it can deform itself to correct deformation the laser beams it controls.

Lasers are used in manufacturing to cut materials or weld components together. Laser light is focused to a point using various lenses and mirrors obviously, the smaller the focal point and the higher the energy, the more accurately operators can work with the laser.

Zinc supplements reduce diarrhea, one of the biggest killers of kids under five, and other infections in malnourished children, according to a review in The Cochrane Library. 

Zinc is a micronutrient with important roles in growth and in the immune, nervous and reproductive systems. The human body cannot make it, so it has to come from our diet. It is estimated that more than 1 in 6 people globally are deficient in zinc and that around 1 in every 58 deaths in children under five is related to zinc deficiency. Zinc deficiency is common in Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Latin America.

There is new evidence to suggest that lightning on Earth is triggered by cosmic rays from space - and energetic particles from the Sun.

How so? They linked increased thunderstorm activity on Earth and streams of high-energy particles accelerated by the solar wind.

Conclusion: Particles from space help trigger lightning bolts.

Writing Environmental Research Letters, the researchers from Reading's Department of Meteorology found a substantial and significant increase in lightning rates across Europe for up to 40 days after the arrival of high-speed solar winds, which can travel at more than a million miles per hour, into the Earth's atmosphere.

So what causes these changes?

What makes the perfect beer foam? Is it nucleation in the glass? Beer is well-traveled ground on Science 2.0 and that means beer foam has been covered as well.

The biggest advice. Be careful with the detergent you use to wash your glass. An already lipid-optimized brew will not benefit from extra fat left over by detergent.

Cornell food researchers focus on lipids too, barley lipid transfer protein No. 1, aka LTP1.

Bitter compounds found in hops, like iso-alpha acids, are important to brewers, says Cornell's Karl J. Siebert, principal investigator and author of "Recent Discoveries in Beer Foam" in the Journal of the American Society of Brewing Chemists.

The venom from marine cone snails, used to immobilize prey, contains numerous peptides called conotoxins, some of which can act as painkillers in mammals.

A recent study provides new insight into the mechanisms by which one conotoxin, Vc1.1, inhibits pain. The findings help explain the analgesic powers of this naturally occurring toxin and could eventually lead to the development of synthetic forms of Vc1.1 to treat certain types of neuropathic pain in humans.

Can using a well move a mountain? It will if the well is big enough.

Winter rains and summer groundwater pumping in California's Central Valley make the Sierra Nevada and Coast Mountain Ranges sink and rise.

How much? A few millimeters each year. That doesn't sound like a lot but it creaes stress on the state's faults that could increase the risk of an earthquake.

Gradual depletion of the Central Valley aquifer due to groundwater pumping also raises these mountain ranges by a similar amount - about the thickness of a dime - each year, according to a new paper in Nature. That cumulative rise over the past 150 years could be up to 6 inches, according to calculations by the geophysicists. 

U.S. law requires posting summarized results on ClinicalTrials.gov, a service of the National Institutes of Health, within one year of study completion for certain categories of industry-sponsored trials. 

The European Union is considering following the US lead yet in some fields compliance with the U.S. law is still rather poor. 

Does it matter? There is increasing public pressure to report the results of all clinical trials. The belief if this would eliminate publication bias and improve public access but that is not evidence-based. What is the point of reading about failed industry trials? The products can't be approved, they will never be released and the start-up company behind the work will be sold off for parts soon after. 

Current computing is based on binary logic -- zeroes and ones -- also called Boolean computing, but a new type of computing architecture stores information in the frequencies and phases of periodic signals and could work more like the human brain using a fraction of the energy necessary for today's computers, according to a team of engineers.

Vanadium dioxide is called a "wacky oxide" because it transitions from a conducting metal to an insulating semiconductor and vice versa with the addition of a small amount of heat or electrical current. A device created by electrical engineers at Penn State uses a thin film of vanadium oxide on a titanium dioxide substrate to create an oscillating switch.

In 2009, a report on the state of forensic science by the National Academy of Sciences noted the lack of sound science in the analysis of evidence in criminal cases across the country.

You wouldn't know it from television shows, but even the most common and long-standing forensic techniques such as fingerprinting are considered questionable - and defense attorneys have a field day promoting fear and doubt about science in the best of circumstances.