• What is ‘Answering Machine Talk’?

“Answering machine talk represents a form of mediated conversation in which messages are recorded to facilitate communication between participants.“

• What of the resources?

“The talk which occurs in such messages draws upon the pool of available resources for telephone-based communication…”

• What of the constraints?

“[telephone-based communication] … modifies these resources as the result of constraints imposed by the communicative environment.”

A new analysis has affirmed what many in the science audience already knew; mainstream media prefer weak observational studies. It's why you're reading this article here instead of the New York Times.

And that is not just in regards to social psychology correlations made using surveys of college students or sociology mysticism, it happens in medical coverage too. The examination found that observational studies get far better coverage than actual randomized controlled trials, which are what should really be important to most people.

In a previous article I built a magnetic stirrer using littleBits and Erector set parts for the home laboratory. At the end of the article I added a design for a sample rotator (a device used to continuously mix lab samples). I have (somewhat) improved the design of the Erector set and littleBits sample rotator and in this article I document the build.

The Rotator ”Base”

Currently in the UK, when health care workers are "unequivocally guilty of willful or reckless neglect or mistreatment of patients" that is not criminal behavior but Dr. Jo Bibby, Director of Strategy at the Health Foundation, writing in BMJ, says the proposal, made in response to the Francis inquiry, will close a gap in the law and is one of many important steps to improving patient care, though won't prevent any deaths.

Where do new genes come from?

It's a long standing debate in evolutionary biology but a new paper in Science Express says that new genes are created from non-coding DNA, and more rapidly than expected.

If you think wilding was much more civilized when you were young, well, you're old.

Older people are more likely to regard the behavior of younger people as anti-social, even if it doesn't bother young people at all. One example is swearing. 80% of adults in a recent survey thought swearing in a public place was anti-social behavior compared while less than 43% of young people did. When it comes to skateboarding on the street, over 60% of adults were against it while less than 8% of young people were. Mysteriously, even douchebikery behavior by cyclists had a generation gap regarding how annoying it was.

It was once commonly known than ancient Carthaginians sacrificed their children. The evidence was right there, in historical documents and graves.

A new paper has demonstrated the power of path tracking to measure social behavior and automatically determine dogs' personalities.

How dogs behave during walks reveals a lot about traits such as trainability, controllability, aggression, age and dominance. Dogs that consistently took the lead were more responsive to training, more controllable, older and more aggressive than the dogs that tended to follow.

Dogs that led more often had higher dominance ranks in everyday situations, assessed by a dominance questionnaire.

Human induced-pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) derived from human umbilical cord-blood are capable of repairing damaged retinal vascular tissue in mice, according to a new paper.

The adult stem cells were coaxed turned into an embryonic-like state without the conventional use of viruses, which can mutate genes (and thus initiate cancers) and paves the way for regenerative medicine using a stem cell bank of cord-blood derived iPSCs.

What would you do if you were on a borehole drilling expedition and tapped into 1,000 degree Celcius magma at slightly over a mile deep?

Most people would run but the Icelandic Deep Drilling Project
at Krafla in 2009 felt a sense of accomplishment. It was only the second known instance of drilling onto magma (the first was in Hawaii in 2007 and there were on a search for high-temperature geothermal resources.