Sunlight may have benefits not yet discovered. Joseph D'Mello CC BY-NC

Summer sunshine makes most of us feel better, but there may be more to the benefits than just feeling good.

A growing body of evidence suggests sunlight itself – with adequate protection, of course – may actually be good for health.

Mandarin-speaking Chinese more likely to read emotions in the voices of others, while English-speaking North Americans rely more on facial expressions, according to a new paper. That may be why Americans think Chinese language is exaggerated while the Chinese believe Americans are too physically expressive.

Yet it isn't just a style issue, it can be seen in brain activity.

Stockholm is considered the world's most sunlight-deprived capital - in November of 2014 the Swedes living there had just a few hours of the stuff and in winter months, it will get dark at 3 PM anyway, so if the sun is hidden by clouds, it can be a real downer. 

Yet not everywhere in Sweden is so bleak. Because there are so few solar laboratories in the world, KTH Royal Institute of Technology reasoned that Stockholm was the perfect place to build one and in there, the future is bright 24 hours a day.

Will the FCC repeat past mistakes of regulating telecommunications as utilities? Shutterstock

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman Tom Wheeler claims that his plan to regulate Internet Service Providers (ISPs) under Title II of the 1934 Telecommunications Act is “rooted in long-standing regulatory principles.”

That’s not necessarily a good thing.

Regular concert-goers are used to seeing singers use expressive and even very dramatic facial expressions - that's because it works.

Music and speech are alike in that they use both facial and acoustic cues to engage listeners in an emotional experience and so  a team of researchers at McGill University wondered what roles these different cues played in conveying emotions.

If wind and solar companies want to continue to get government money, they should take a page out of the natural gas playbook - a new economic analysis found that just three state grants to support natural gas programs totaling $52.9 million generated $128 million in economic impact and 927 full-time jobs in 2014. 

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) administered the three grants: the Clean Transportation Triangle (CTT), the Alternative Fueling Facilities Program (AFFP) and the Texas Natural Gas Vehicle Program (TNGVP).

Can he be the global warming culprit? Link

Could our meat-loving Western diets push climate change over the edge?

That was the message of a recent report from UK think tank Chatham House that, even if the world moves away from fossil fuels, growth in meat and dairy consumption could still take global warming beyond the safe threshold of 2C.

The demise of radio has been predicted for 70 years, but it is still going strong - it is just more consolidated than it was in the past. Even college radio which, thanks to taxpayers, isn't under the same financial pressure as the corporate kind, has declined in popularity, because young people have been listening to the radio much less.

Yet since 2008, social networks have been changing that. Like much of college radio, it wasn't planned but they made it a feature as it happened. 

Credit: L. Sabetelli / Wellcome, CC BY

The Black Death struck Europe in 1347, killing 30-50% of the European population in six violent years.

It wasn’t a one-off epidemic: it signaled the start of the second plague pandemic in Europe that lasted for hundreds of years and only slowly disappeared from the continent after the Great Plague of London in 1665-1666.

In an experiment, 221 college students in an online chat room watched a fellow student get "bullied" right before their eyes but only 10 percent did something about it, either by helping the victim or confronting the bully.

Even in the safe online world, modern young people are less inclined than ever to get involved. Using the online equivalent of taking a picture of a victim rather than helping, 70 percent of participants who noticed the bullying gave the bully or the chat room a bad review. For the experiment, the undergraduate students were led to believe they would be testing an online chat support feature that was part of a server used for online research surveys and studies.