It's not often that I can say I am stunned by a judicial decision but I have been talking about Yucca Mountain since President Obama took office and immediately honored his deal with Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada to kill the project, after every study by scientists found it the safest place for 70,000 metric tons of high-level waste and a whole lot of money had been spent.

It was the most flagrant scientization of politics in recent memory - and the court has taken notice.

“taH pagh taHbe’. DaH mu’tlheghvam vIqeInIS.” – the translation of which, as speakers of Klingon will know, is “To be or not to be; that is the question.” 

The Klingon Shakespeare Restoration Project has received considerable attention from academia – see for example: ‘Adapting Shakespeare for Star Trek and Star Trek for Shakespeare: The Klingon Hamlet and The Spaces of Translation‘ (Studies in Popular Culture, vol 32, no. 2, pp. 35-55.)

Researchers writing in the Canadian Journal of Physiology and Pharmacology suggest that incubating retinal cells with vegetable oils induces biochemical and biophysical changes in the cell membrane, which may have a beneficial effect in preventing or slowing the development of retinopathy.

Dysfunction of retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) cells is found in retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration, which is the leading cause of blindness of elderly people in developed countries. 

Astronomers have discovered a pulsar at the center of our Milky Way and this magnetar -  a pulsar with extremely high magnetic fields of the order of 100 million (10⁸) Tesla, about 1,000 times stronger than the magnetic fields of ordinary neutron stars - and its extremely strong magnetic field enabled researchers to investigate the direct vicinity of the black hole at the heart of the galaxy. 

They measured the strength of the magnetic field around this central source and were able to show that the latter is fed by magnetic fields. These control the inflow of mass into the black hole, also explaining the x-ray emissions of this gravity trap.

'Family annihilators', where the male parent murders the family, are most prevalent in August.

That doesn't mean much, it is too rare a crime to have a lot of data and when there are 12 months in the year, one month is going to be first, but the first ever study of British ‘family annihilators’ uses that and similar facts over three decades of cases to create four new types of 'annihilator'.

There is no evidence that impaired blood flow or blockage in the veins of the neck or head is involved in multiple sclerosis, according to a new paper in an open access journal.

Difficulty in registering and responding to facial expressions is a characteristic of autism and somr functional imaging studies claim that individuals with autism, and its very wide modern spectrum of disorders, display altered brain activations when processing facial images.

The hormone oxytocin plays a role in the social interactions of both animals and humans. Studies conducted with healthy volunteers have provided evidence for beneficial effects of oxytocin in terms of increased trust, improved emotion recognition, and preference for social stimuli.

I recently examined (and found wanting) the so-called computational theory of mind, albeit in the context of a broader post about the difference between scientific theories and what I think are best referred to as philosophical accounts (such as the above mentioned computational “theory”). Defenders of strong versions of computationalism (which amounts to pretty much the same thing as strong AI) often invoke the twin concepts of computation itself and of the Church-Turing thesis to imply that computationalism is not only obviously true, but has been shown to be so by way of mathematical proof.

Finasteride, a generic drug used by physicians to treat enlarged prostate and male pattern baldness, was found to significantly reduce the risk of prostate cancer. During the trial of 19,000 men, a slightly higher percentage of those on finasteride developed high-grade cancer than those taking a placebo. This difference shrank in the follow-up analysis, which caused concern and debate in the medical community, and doctors backed away from prescribing the drug.

Some of the ancient civilizations that flourished in regions of the Eastern Mediterranean - Aegean, Egyptian, Syro-Palestinian, and Hittite civilizations - collapsed during the late Bronze Age. 

Hieroglyphic and cuneiform text remains portray invasions of the “Peoples-of-the-Sea” at the Nile Delta, the Turkish coast, and down into the heartlands of Syria and Palestine. Armies clashed, famine-ravaged cities were abandoned, and countrysides were depopulated. Mycenaean, Hittites, Canaanites and Egypt's New Kingdom all suffered dramatic declines.