Celebrity promotion of charities is ineffective at raising awareness, but can make the stars more popular with the public, according to two papers. This will be a surprise to both celebrities and charities, since campaigning for worthwhile groups has always been done by celebrities and charities seek them out because of the belief that people will donate after endorsements when they otherwise might not.

Or so it seems. It may be that organizations are biased toward success stories and don't see how often it does little.

Funding agencies spend a great deal of money to try and recruit females into math and science-related careers and a new psychology paper underlines the importance of mentoring and other social support systems for women pursuing those research professions. 

Gallstone pain is one of the most common reasons patients visit emergency rooms and how to handle gallstone patients is a cost and quality issue in health care. In the United States, 1 in 10 women and 1 in 15 men have gallstones, and more than 1 million people a year are hospitalized for gallstone disease. Fatty food common in U.S. diets is a contributing factor, according to studies.

Between Greenland and Spitsbergen, scientists have found the scours on the sea bed left behind by gigantic icebergs - about three times the height of the Empire State Building. The five lineaments, at a depth of 1,200 meters, are the lowest-lying iceberg scours yet to be found on the Arctic sea floor, and provide insight into the dynamics and the extent of last Ice Age and the Arctic ice sheet thousands of years ago.  

"Whenever icebergs run aground, they leave scours on the seabed. Depending on their depth and location, those markings may continue to exist over long periods of time," explained Jan Erik Arndt,  Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) bathymetrician and lead author of a new paper on the subject.  

The biggest mystery in the mid-east is why countries of one religion won't put the country of another religion on any geographical maps in any of its schools, but the second biggest mystery is why many of the oldest parts of Jerusalem's Western Wall look like they could have been placed yesterday.

The Western Wall is a remnant of the ancient wall that surrounded the courtyard of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. It is located in Jerusalem's Old City at the foot of the Temple Mount.

At the ends of the Universe there are black holes billions of times the mass of our sun. These giant quasars feed on interstellar gas, swallowing large quantities of it non-stop - and that is how they can be detected: The light that is emitted by the gas as it is sucked in and crushed by the black hole's gravity travels for eons across the Universe until it reaches our telescopes.

Looking at the edges of the Universe is looking into the past. These far-off, ancient quasars appear to us in their "baby photos" taken less than a billion years after the Big Bang: monstrous infants in a young Universe.

Generex Biotechnology Corporation has announced publication of a follow-up study from a Phase I clinical trial of the immunotherapeutic agent AE37 in patients with prostate cancer. The study demonstrates an association between a specific immune response generated by AE37 and improved overall survival.  

A prior study showed that AE37-immunized patients had better overall and disease-free survival as a group than would be expected from their disease status and the current study shows that patients with the strongest immunological response did the best. In particular, both the presence of AE37-induced T cells in peripheral blood as well as a robust delayed type hypersensitivity (DTH) response elicited by AE37 correlated significantly with overall survival.

Hey, heads up Public: game-changing new science means we can probably make insects stop spreading malaria, dengue fever, and Lyme disease.  Or reverse pesticide resistance in agricultural pests.  Or even eliminate invasive (or otherwise undesired) species.  But this has major public policy implications, and scientists want to make sure everybody knows what we’re getting into and we set up safeguards before any of this actually happens.

You can easily build a Cartesian diver toy using an empty one liter soda bottle (with the label torn off), a ketchup packet, and tap water. You may want to have a few ketchup packets on hand and put them in a cup of water to see if they sink or float. Keep the one that floats and use the rest for your French fries.