When it comes to demographics and society, no one likes surveys and statistics that make them look less positive. Yet surveys and statistics are all we have to go by in order to know if people are treating each other the way they expect to be treated in turn.

In society, there is a belief that women will be more cooperative than men. In academia, that is not the case, according to a paper in Current Biology. Instead, women in academia are less likely to cooperate than men.

The findings are based on an analysis of the publication records of professors working at 50 North American universities.And the lack of cooperation is most evident in an area where women overwhelmingly dominate - psychology.

On a per capita electricity production basis, environmentalists are winning the war on energy

Electricity for all, which was once considered the goal of technological progress, is now treated like a giant step on the road to an ecological Apocalypse. As a result, we've increased regulation and decreased generation and the price per kilowatt-hour has gone up and supply per capita has gone down. We can thank a confluence of bad ideas, chiefly subsidies for inefficient and expensive green alternatives, penalties for coal and natural gas, and a war on nuclear science.

Nature is always looking for new ways to stay ahead. To-date, resistance to pesticides has been recorded in more than 500 insects, 218 weeds, and 190 fungi that attack plants.

The recorded cases of resistance in insects, mites and other arthropods, which include resistance to multiple pesticides per species, more than doubled between 1990 and 2013, from 5,141 to 11,254.

How will a new glossary help? The authors of updated definitions in the Journal of Economic Entomology say a common vocabulary is needed because the current jumble of terms fosters confusion among scientists in academia, industry and government.  

The Super-CDMS dark-matter search has released two days ago the results from the analysis of nine months of data taking. The experiment has excellent sensitivity to weak interacting massive particles producing inelastic scattering with the Germanium in the detector.

The detector is composed of fifteen cylindrical 0.6 kg crystals stacked in groups of three, equipped with ionization and phonon detectors that are capable of measuring the energy of the signals. From that the recoil energy can be derived, and a rough estimate of WIMP candidates mass. The towers are kept at close to absolute zero temperature in the Soudan mine, where backgrounds from cosmic rays and other sources are very small.

Cosmologist Sean Carroll is one of many who have recently answered the annual question posed by Edge.org, which this year was: What scientific idea is ready for retirement? Sean, whom I’ve met at the Naturalism workshop he organized not long ago, and for whom I have the highest respect both as a scientist and as a writer, picked “falsifiability.”

ROCHESTER, Minn — Feb. 3, 2014 — A new Mayo Clinic study found that among middle-aged men and women, 40 to 60 years old, the overall incidence of skin cancer increased nearly eightfold between 1970 and 2009, according to a study published in the January issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings.

"The most striking finding was among women in that age group," says dermatologist Jerry Brewer, M.D., principal investigator of the study. "Women between 40 and 50 showed the highest rates of increase we've seen in any group so far."

With nearly one-third of Americans suffering from chronic pain, prescription opioid painkillers have become the leading form of treatment for this debilitating condition. Unfortunately, misuse of prescription opioids can lead to serious side effects—including death by overdose. A new treatment developed by University of Utah researcher Eric Garland has shown to not only lower pain but also decrease prescription opioid misuse among chronic pain patients.

There is a growing need for Cognitive Rehabilitation Therapy (CRT) due to  athletes with sports-related head injuries, a growing population with age-related cognitive decline and soldiers returning from war zones with brain injuries.

A special collection of articles in NeuroRehabilitation illustrates the art and science of restoring mental functioning in those who have suffered a debilitating injury or who may otherwise have problems with attention, comprehension, learning, remembering, problem solving, reasoning, and processing.

While the origin of life remains mysterious, scientists are finding more and more evidence that material created in space and delivered to Earth by comet and meteor impacts could have given a boost to the start of life. Some meteorites supply molecules that can be used as building blocks to make certain kinds of larger molecules that are critical for life.