People who gravitate toward the latest technology regard themselves as progressives mavericks on the cutting edge - and then they stand in a line outside the Apple store.

Apple products don't look good, and they aren't particularly original - having to jailbreak your phone to use it the way you want and being told you can only use their power supply is more Soviet gulag than 21st century technological freedom but a lot of people still consider them cool. And perception matters most. If a product appears to be losing its coolness, it's over, Friendster.

Who better to know what cool is than a big university academic? Like with business, they can create trends from past data even if they can't create a product themselves.

The Great Recession of 2009 deepened income inequality - except for the government, a lot more people were out of work and scholars have correlated that to county-by-county rates of child maltreatment, from sexual, physical and emotional abuse to traumatic brain injuries and death.

The income inequality-child maltreatment correlation came using all 3,142 American counties from 2005-09, and the authors say it is one of the most comprehensive of its kind and the first to target child abuse in places with the greatest gap between rich and poor.  Nearly 3 million children younger than 18 are physically abused, sexually abused, physically neglected or emotionally abused each year in the United States, the authors noted. That is about 4 percent of the youth population. 

Though the evidence shows that people are not really different during a full moon, like homeopathy or organic food benefits happen just often enough that people are convinced by the placebo/nocebo effect to believe there must be something to it.

And science has its moon quirks too. Why, for example, would signals bouncing off the moon be so faint on full moon evenings?

The answer is in an eclipse, which has had its own share of superstitious attributions.

Researchers have aimed laser beams at suitcase-sized reflectors placed on the moon by Apollo astronauts and unmanned Soviet rovers. By precisely timing the light's return to Earth, they can measure the distance from here to the moon with millimeter precision.

A new paper by Davison Soper and Michael Spannowsky has been sent to the Cornell preprint ArXiv last week. It proposes a new technique to reconstruct the decay of heavy particles within hadronic jets, and shows how this can improve the sensitivity to heavy new particles by studying in particular the case of a heavy Z' boson decaying to boosted top quark pairs. I believe the technique is very interesting and I will try to give a few impressions of it here; before I do, let me introduce the topic for outsiders.

In the endless war on pharmaceutical companies, there is a consistent refrain; the US Food and Drug Administration is too slow to approve new drugs unless it approved drugs too quickly and the product hurt someone. Mainstream media highlight the complaints of doctors and patients that some drug or another is available in Europe or Asia but not here and then on another page delights in a lawsuit about how evil the company was for making a drug which carried risks.

Has your spouse heard all of your stories by now? Other people haven't and if they are impressed by your wit and personality and openness about personal details, it will add romance points, say social psychologists. 

Many people in their school years like Manga comics. They predate the American kind by about 150 years, are generally more complex and even older American adults got an introduction to it in cartoon versions of "Astro Boy."

In recent decades, they have grown in popularity so it was only a matter of time before someone came up with the idea of social engineering using them. A recent pilot program in Brooklyn used minority students and found that exposure to Manga promoting fruit intake significantly improved healthy snack selection. Conclusion: we can solve obesity by using a Transportation-Imagery Model

Earth's largest mass extinction occurred some 252 million years ago, wiping out more than 96 percent of marine species and 70 percent of life on land, including the largest insects known to have inhabited the Earth. Multiple hypotheses have tried to determine the cause of what's now known as the end-Permian extinction, including everything from an asteroid impact to massive volcanic eruptions and a cataclysmic cascade of environmental events.

While the developed world has levels of scientific and technical capacity that allow crop pests to be effectively managed, poorer nations, where food production is incredibly important, are caught in a tug-of-war between modern agriculture and an activist culture that tells them not to trust science.

As a result, not only are crop pests not effectively managed, with the disastrous drops in yields that brings, but no one can even be sure what crop pests there are.

Cool roofs, green roofs and hybrids of the two are all of the rage for city planners who want to do something about greenhouse-gas induced warming.

They sound great but is it going to work, or is it another idealized wish that incurs cost but has little benefit (like replacing spoons in the Congressional cafeteria with corn-based alternatives that melted in soup and ending up being worse for the environment) outside public relations campaigns?