Some sharks are more 'gregarious' than others and have strong social connections while others are solitary and prefer to remain inconspicuous. That's not an exception, according to a new study, these notorious predators have personality traits.

Personalities obviously exist in many animals but they are usually defined by individual characteristics such as how exploratory, bold or aggressive an individual animal is. The paper in
the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology involved testing for social personality by recording the social interactions of groups of juvenile small spotted catsharks in captivity under three different habitat types.  

We are stardust - scientists and citizen scientists alike

Physics Today's Ashley Smart describes a huge recent win for citizen science: some 30,000 volunteers pored over millions of microscopic images looking for dust collected a decade ago by NASA's Stardust probe, and their efforts have helped identify candidate interstellar grains:

Abortion and teen pregnancy dropped among teens who received free contraception and were educated about the pros and cons of various birth control methods, according to a new study in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Giving publishing power to the people. Credit: Thinglass/Shutterstock

By Gillian Rudd, University of Liverpool

The need for caution when any anomaly is revealed in new research. Credit: Flickr/Adam Gerard, CC BY-NC-SA

By Michael J. I. Brown, Monash University

UNDERSTANDING RESEARCH: What do we actually mean by research and how does it help inform our understanding of things? What if research throws up a result that calls for a new way of thinking? How do we handle that?

Ice sheets were never simple. There is no magic knob that could be turned to optimize melting rates and movement, outside environmental press releases.

A new paper in Nature this week
shows that not only is meltwater not as simple as sometimes contended, we don't even know what we don't know. Observations of moulins (vertical conduits connecting water on top of the glacier down to the bed of the ice sheet) and boreholes in Greenland show that subglacial channels ameliorate the speedup caused by water delivery to the base of the ice sheet in the short term.

BEIJING; BERKELEY, CA; and UPTON, NY - The Daya Bay Collaboration, an international group of scientists studying the subtle transformations of subatomic particles called neutrinos, is publishing its first results on the search for a so-called sterile neutrino,

Though the search is on for a possible new type of neutrino beyond the three known neutrino "flavors," or types, the so-called sterile neutrino remains elusive.

A new paper by the Daya Bay Collaboration in Physical Review Letters finds no evidence for sterile neutrinos in a previously unexplored mass range.

When choosing a new leader, people base their decision on desirable characteristics such as honesty and trustworthiness. However once leaders are in power, can we trust them to exercise it in a prosocial manner? 

A new paper in The Leadership Quarterly finds that everyone gradually becomes susceptible to power the longer they have it.  Study author John Antonakis and his colleagues from the University of Lausanne explain, "We looked to examine what Lord Acton said over 100 years ago, that 'Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.'"

To investigate this the authors used experimental methods to distinguish between the situational and individual component; and determine if power corrupts or if corrupt individuals are drawn to power.

If you need another good reason to hit the gym, a new study finds it can improve memory. Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have found that an intense workout of as little as 20 minutes can enhance episodic memory, also known as long-term memory for previous events, by about 10 percent in healthy young adults

In video games, and in software downloads and processes, the status bar is often cheered or reviled. But they are here to stay.

And now it may be possible to 'gamify' your medical progress. 

Inspired by a desire to help wounded soldiers, researchers have created a paint-on, see-through, "smart" bandage that glows to indicate a wound's tissue oxygenation concentration - because oxygen plays a critical role in healing. Mapping these levels in severe wounds and burns can help to significantly improve the success of surgeries to restore limbs and physical functions.