Edward Snowden: patriot or traitor? Whatever your opinion of Mr. Snowden, he did give us pause to reflect on our Fourth Amendment rights “of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” When contemplating the problem, one must first answer why the Fourth Amendment was considered so important that it needed to be added to the Bill of Rights.

Extraction using hydraulic fracturing - fracking - has made North America the world's largest producer of oil and gas, while US CO2 emissions from energy have dropped back to early 1990s levels and the most offensive producer, coal, has been pushed back to 1980s levels. Despite those benefits, there have endless protests from environmentalists that fracking is worse for pollution. 

Does drilling for natural gas really cause pollution levels to skyrocket, the way activists claim? 

Thermionic conversion to heat energy, such as light from the sun or heat from burned fossil fuels, can mean very high efficiency, and because of its promise has been researched for over 50 years with little success.

That may soon change, thanks to a new design, dubbed a thermoelectronic generator, described in the Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy.

Modern science has made it possible to synthesize increasingly targeted drugs but Ma Nature is not out of it yet - it just took science to discover what nature could do. Pyridomycin, a substance produced by non-pathogenic soil bacteria, has been found to be a potent antibiotic against a related strain of bacteria that cause tuberculosis. 

The
Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
scientists who discovered this property now have a better understanding of how its complex, three-dimensional structure allows it to act simultaneously on two parts of a key enzyme in the tuberculosis bacillus, and in doing so, dramatically reduce the risk that the bacteria will develop multiple resistances. 

Science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) advocacy has become all the rage at colleges, universities and other institutions as the US government spends billions doing outreach to make students more technical.

A new, internationally agreed radiocarbon calibration curve method will allow key past events to be dated more accurately.

The work led by Professors Paul Blackwell and Caitlin Buck from the University of Sheffield's School of Mathematics and Statistics and Professor Paula Reimer from Queen's University Belfast will lead to improved accuracy for archaeologists, environmental scientists and climate researchers who rely on radiocarbon dating to put their findings onto a reliable time-scale.

The release of the new curve will mean that more precise date estimates can be obtained than previously possible and will reduce uncertainty about the timing of major events in the history and development of humans, plants and animals and the environments in which they lived.

The concept of permanent neurological injury is so 20th century.

Instead, there has been gradual recognition of the brain's potential for long-term regeneration and reorganization and so rehabilitations strategies are undergoing radical changes. The potential for five new translational interventions was examined in an recent Neurology Clinical Practice article.

A single dose of the hormone oxytocin, delivered via nasal spray, has been shown to enhance brain activity while processing social information in children with autism spectrum disorders.

 Results showed that oxytocin facilitated social attunement, a process that makes the brain regions involved in social behavior and social cognition activate more for social stimuli (such as faces) and activate less for non-social stimuli (such as cars). 

Australian astronomers have derived a catchy way to prevent catastrophic, multi-billion dollar space junk collisions -  by listening in to the radio signals generated by stations like the popular youth network Triple J. 

The project spearheaded by Curtin University in Western Australia uses the newly operational Murchison Widefield Array (MWA), one of three precursor telescopes for the $2 billion Square Kilometre Array project, to detect radio waves reflecting off thousands of objects orbiting the earth. The study has already tracked radio waves from FM transmitters located near Perth and Geraldton bouncing off the International Space Station as it passed over Western Australia, approximately 500 kilometres above the Earth's surface.   

A new paper in Free Radical Biology and Medicine
suggests that a diet low in vitamin D causes damage to the brain.

In addition to being essential for maintaining bone health, the new evidence found that vitamin D serves important roles in other organs and tissue, including the brain. The study showed that middle-aged rats that were fed a diet low in vitamin D for several months developed free radical damage to the brain, and many different brain proteins were damaged as identified by redox proteomics.

These rats also showed a significant decrease in cognitive performance on tests of learning and memory.