UCLA psychologists
using a scale of responses to scenarios are saying that white Americans may view diversity and multiculturalism negatively as the U.S. moves toward becoming a minority-majority nation.

The psychologists divided 98 white Americans from all regions of the country — half male, half female, with an average age of 37 — randomly into two groups. One group was told that whites will no longer be the majority in the U.S. by 2050; in fact, this is likely to be true as soon as 2043, according to some projections. The second group was told that whites would retain their majority status in the U.S. through at least 2050. All participants were then asked a series of questions about their views on diversity.

Almost 20 percent of the Earth's atmosphere is oxygen. Green plants produce it as a byproduct of photosynthesis and it, in turn, is used by most living things on the planet to keep our metabolisms running.

Yet before those photosynthesizing organisms appeared about 2.4 billion years ago, the atmosphere was mostly carbon dioxide, a lot like Mars and Venus.

The common hypothesis is that there must have been a small amount of oxygen in the early atmosphere. Where did this abiotic ("non-life") oxygen come from? Oxygen reacts quite aggressively with other compounds, so it would not persist for long without some continuous source.

Now that Major League Baseball’s regular season has ended with the wild wildcard win by the Kansas City Royals over the Oakland A’s and with the Pittsburgh Pirates being eliminated by the San Francisco Giants, I've once again begun analyzing the probability of each team advancing through each round of baseball’s postseason.

The Los Angeles Dodgers (71%) and the Washington Nationals (68%) have the greatest chance of advancing to the National League Championship Series going into their first Division Series games. The Kansas City Royals (61%) and Baltimore Orioles (64%) after winning the first game of their Division Series have turned themselves from underdogs into favorites.

A new imaging system is capable of obtaining up to twelve times more color information than the human eye and conventional cameras, which implies a total of 36 color channels.

The system involves a new generation of sensors in combination with a matrix of multispectral filters to improve their performance. 

Social network analysis could improve knowledge sharing in the healthcare sector, according to a paper which shows how knowledge management systems (KMS) can be critical in capturing, retaining and communicating project results and staff knowledge. They can prevent knowledge drain and provide training as "lessons learned" following specific occurrences and the resolution of particular problems the staff face.

When you take a shower and use soap and then lather, rinse and repeat twice with that shampoo, it gets washed off your body and goes down the drain.

Environmentalists have claimed these soaps and shampoos and washing machine detergents - surfactants - seep into groundwater, lakes and streams, where they could pose a risk to fish and frogs.

But do they? Not likely, finds a new report of the potential impact on the environment of the enormous amounts of common surfactants used day in and day out by consumers all over the world. 

Evidence shows children are getting less unsupervised time outdoors. Credit: Brian Yap (葉)/Flickr, CC BY-NC

By Shelby Gull Laird and Laura McFarland-Piazza

Not the one we have fixed in our imaginations. Peter Paul Rubens, 1638

By Helen King, The Open University

Hippocrates is considered the father of medicine, enemy of superstition, pioneer of rationality and fount of eternal wisdom.

Statues and drawings show him with a furrowed brow, thinking hard about how to heal his patients.

Though it has been researched for decades, the cause of nodding syndrome, a disabling disease affecting African children, is unknown. A new report suggests that blackflies infected with the parasite Onchocerca volvulus may be capable of passing on a secondary pathogen responsible for the spread of the disease. 

Concentrated in South Sudan, Northern Uganda, and Tanzania, nodding syndrome is a debilitating and deadly disease that affects young children between the ages of 5 and 15. When present, the first indication of the disease is an involuntary nodding of the head, followed by epileptic seizures. The condition can cause cognitive deterioration, stunted growth, and in some cases, death.

In third place, Oxford University is the top UK institution in the World University Rankings 2014-15. Image:  Andrew Matthews/PA Archive

By Steven C. Ward, Western Connecticut State University

From the “best beaches” to the “best slice of pizza” to the best hospital to have cardiac surgery in, we are inundated with a seemingly never-ending series of reports ranking everything that can be ranked and even things that probably shouldn’t be.