Cranky old people might think that mellow crooning is less damaging to the voice than beatboxing, with its harsh, high-energy percussive sounds.

Not so, according to a paper in the Journal of Voice.  Beatboxing may be harder on the ears, that is why Michael Bublé gets more downloads than Killa Kela, but it may actually be gentler on vocal cords, which are already injury-prone. His findings were published Dec. 23 online in the Journal of Voice.

The assumption has long been that if mercury is increasing in fish in the North American and European Arctic, the same is true of fish elsewhere in the Arctic.

Not so, according to conservation scientists from the U.S., Russia, and Canada.  Atmospheric mercury comes largely from mining and ore processing, such as smelting, according to United Nations analyses. Under certain water conditions, through the process called methylation, mercury is converted to methylmercury, a special form that can be absorbed by living organisms. Methylmercury is highly toxic.

A new paper studied if the excitability of the motor cortex correlates with working memory performance – and results were positive. 

By measuring the motor excitability, conclusions can be drawn as to general cortical excitability – as well as to cognitive performance, say the scholars from the Transfacultary Research Platform at the University of Basel.

Working memory allows the temporary storage of information such as memorizing a phone number for a short period of time. Studies in animals have shown that working memory processes among others depend on the excitability of neurons in the prefrontal cortex. There is some evidence that motor neuronal excitability might be related to the neuronal excitability of other cortical regions. 

In every country, centralized government is funded by mandatory public taxation and that means a layer of bureaucracy to go after tax evaders.

It can obviously be good for the community - people get along better when they aren't micromanaging the finances of police and fire stations on a monthly basis. And in small communities, self-policing is easy. Everyone knows who the cheats are.

If you are an avid gamer who can't be bothered with cooking Christmas dinner, or a hipster who wants to cynically consume packaged food while watching bad movies, there is a good news.

The Christmas Tinner is 9 layers of processed food in a can, meals to cover the entire day - including breakfast, turkey and even Christmas pudding. There’s even a broccoli alternative if the sprouts are the worst thing you can find in this idea.

Kingston University third-year graphic designer Chris Godfrey claims to have processed the food and sealed it with gelatin, placing each layer in the tin one at a time. All the gamer has to do is open and eat.

As I’ve mentioned on other occasions, my most recent effort in philosophy of science actually concerns what my collaborator Maarten Boudry and I call the philosophy of pseudoscience. During a recent discussion we had with some of the contributors to our book at the recent congress of the European Philosophy of Science Association, Maarten came up with the idea of the pseudoscience black hole. Let me explain.

Since the discovery of the charm quark in 1974, physicists have postulated a rare process in which a charm particle spontaneously changes into its antiparticle. Evidence for this behavior was uncovered three decades later by experiments in the US and Japan. However, conclusive observation did not emerge until this year from the CERN laboratory in Switzerland and Fermilab in the U.S. 

What is a charm quark? Protons and neutrons, the particles in an atomic nucleus, are made of smaller pieces called quarks and some types of quarks can form particles that exhibit surprising behaviors.

Like computers, our brains work on inductance. A switch is open or closed, a signal is passed. Brains follow rules, like computers. 

But if the brain is like a computer, why do brains make mistakes that computers don't?

Psychologist Gary Lupyan at the University of Wisconsin–Madison says that our brains stumble on even the simplest rule-based calculations because humans get caught up in contextual information, even when the rules are as clear-cut as separating even numbers from odd.

Almost all adults understand that it's the last digit — and only the last digit —that determines whether a number is even. In a new study, that didn't keep them from mistaking a number like 798 for odd.

Women's perceptions of what is considered normal and desirable female genitalia may be influenced by exposure to modified images, according to psychologists writing in BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology.

Requests for labiaplasty - reducing and making the labia minora symmetrical - have become a fad and are now the most widely performed female genital cosmetic procedure covered by Australian government health care over the past decade, increasing five-fold between 2001 and 2010. 

Determining how proteins misfold to create the tissue-damaging structures that lead to type 2 diabetes is complicated. These amyloid fibrils are also implicated in neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, and in prion diseases like Creutzfeldt-Jacob and mad cow disease.