A young child buried in the medieval town of Ribe in Denmark 800 years ago had an unpleasant life even before that - because the child had been given a large dose of mercury in an attempt to cure a severe, ongoing illness. 

A new methodology developed by chemist Kaare Lund Rasmussen from University of Southern Denmark and colleagues can reveal an unprecedented amount of details about the time even shortly before a person's death. Mercury is of particular interest for the archaeologists as many cultures in different part of the world have been in contact with the rare (and toxic) element.

There is a phenomenon in speech called coarticulation, in which certain sounds are produced differently depending on the sounds that come before or after them.

For example, though the letter n is usually pronounced with the tongue pressed near the middle of the mouth's roof (as in the word "ten") but it's pronounced with the tongue forward when it's followed by a –th, as in tenth).

A decade ago, researchers discovered that coarticulation extends to a different kind of communication - American Sign Language. Knowing that hand movements could be affected according to where they fit in during sign language, researchers wondered if there was a similar effect on hands when they were used to produce sound, such as playing the piano. 

Surveys show that people have less empathy for battered human adults than they do dogs, according to a paper at the American Sociological Association.

Jack Levin  and Arnold Arluke, sociology professors at Northeastern University, used the opinions of 240 men and women, most of whom were white and between the ages of 18-25 (college students), at a large northeastern university (guess which one) who randomly received one of four fictional news articles about; the beating of a one-year-old child, an adult in his thirties, a puppy, or a 6-year-old dog. The stories were identical except for the victim's identify. After reading their story, respondents were asked to rate their feelings of empathy towards the victim.

Do you remember the X(3872) ? This is a hadron containing charm and anticharm quarks, which was observed to decay into a J/Psi meson, a positive, and a negative pion. When it was discovered, by the Belle experiment in 2003, the X caused a lot of interest among spectroscopists, because it is an "exotic" charmonium state: its nature is not totally clear, as it might be interpreted as a "molecule" of two charmed mesons loosely bound together. Or maybe a four-quark system ? Or just conventional charmonium, a bit at odds with the expected set of spin-parity states but otherwise just a honest meson ?

Cocaine use may cause profound metabolic changes which can result in dramatic weight gain during recovery, a distressing phenomenon that can lead to relapse - the reason is because chronic cocaine use may reduce the body's ability to store fat, the authors of a new paper suggest.

It is widely believed that cocaine suppresses the appetite and that the problematic weight gain during rehabilitation was a result of patients substituting food for drugs. 

Two weeks ago, Galveston born and raised George P. Mitchell passed away at age 94. He was well-known as a Texas oil billionaire but less well-known as a keen advocate of science.

Inherited diseases such as cystic fibrosis or Huntington disease involve disease-causing genetic mutations that damage or remove a protein that has an essential role in the body. This protein defect is the root cause of the disease symptoms.

But for congenital muscular dystrophies (CMDs), the sequence of the protein that is central to normal function is typically unaffected. Instead, the defects lie in processing proteins—ones that are responsible for modifying the central protein by adding sugar chains (glycans). Either loss of the glycans or disruption of their structure is sufficient to cause muscle disease.

If you want to understand Earth's evolution, start with how heat is conducted in the deep lower mantle 400 to 1,800 miles below the surface.

Researchers recently did. They were able to simulate the pressure conditions in this region to measure thermal conductivity using a new measurement technique developed by the collaborators and implemented by the Carnegie team on the mantle material magnesium oxide (MgO). They found that heat transfer is lower than other predictions, with total heat flow across the Earth of about 10.4 terawatts, which is about 60 % of the power used today by civilization. They also found that conductivity has less dependence on pressure conditions than predicted. The research is published in the August 9, online Scientific Reports.

Omics slapped at the end of words is the latest rage. It makes just about anything sound scientific. If someone says they read an astrology journal, for example, I might roll my eyes a little, but if they call their journal Astrolomics, well ... okay, I would still roll my eyes a little, but if they say they are attending a Beeronomics conference, they are making their way into my blog.

For children and immune-compromised adults in developing countries, diarrheal disease induced by rotavirus can be life threatening.

Rotavirus is the leading cause of diarrhea in infants and young children worldwide, causing more than 114 million episodes of diarrhea annually in children under the age of 5, 80% of which occur in developing countries. More than 600,000 children die annually from rotavirus (RV) infection

Current rotaviral vaccines are highly effective in the Western world, but are not as effective in developing countries. Additionally, these vaccines are not appropriate for use outside of a very narrow age window or in immune compromised individuals.