In America's modern monolithic science culture, when a desired plan of action is advocated, they call for a 'Manhattan Project of' whatever they are seeking. It's not a great analogy. It reminds people that the last real government science success was 70 years ago and feels rather militant, since the goal of the Manhattan Project was to blow enemies to smithereens.
 

In the current U.S. gun ban debate, both sides are claiming they care about hunters - but it is a dwindling population among Americans and that will cause deer populations to grow out of control, according to new findings in the UK, which has been banning hunting since the days of Robin Hood.

In England, hunting is a pastime only for the wealthy, who can provide two well-known references when they apply with the police and satisfy that they have 'good cause' to possess a gun. The end result is the highest crime levels in the developed world and, as a study by the University of East Anglia (UEA) shows, a runaway deer population problem. 

French women are less likely to spend any time on any physical activities - not sports, exercise or even household chores, compared to women in Germany, Denmark, Sweden and the UK, according to a new survey.

The multi-national survey on sport and exercise habits also reveals that more than 50 percent of French women did not play competitive sport or spend any time on intensive workouts such as running or cycling in a given week. As the French women's football team prepare for this summer's UEFA Women's EURO in Sweden (that's soccer to you Yanks), the countdown to the championships offers an opportunity for women to kick start heart-healthy physical activities and set themselves the goal of being more active.

In Hollywood period pieces, ancient Egypt is disturbingly western-looking actresses rolling out of carpets in magnificent palaces. The reality seems to be different, even for the elites.

Governors and commoners alike suffered from hunger and malnutrition, a whole range of infectious diseases and an extremely high infant mortality rate, according to the Qubbet el-Hawa research project carried out by the University of Jaen, in which anthropologists from the Supreme Council of Antiquities of the Arab Republic of Egypt and the University of Granada sought to separate truth from legend.

If you are in the northern parts of the US (and lots of Canada) you will soon have sap running - and that means maple syrup. You probably don't think about the physiological aspects of syrup production - nor should you, that is why you have Science 2.0.

But now you can learn about the mechanisms of sap exudation—processes that trigger pressure differences causing sap to flow— while you eat your pancakes. In a paper published in the SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics, authors Maurizio Ceseri and John Stockie propose a mathematical model for the essential physiological processes that drive sap flow. 

How is a 3-year-old better than a computer?  A pre-school child can look at a cartoon of a chicken and know that's a chicken but a computer cannot.  But things are getting better. In the International Journal of Applied Pattern Recognition, a
computer recognition system has been shown to be 99% accurate when identifying different fruits and vegetables, even the particular strain of apples or plums.

Being an overweight, lazy person is bad in lots of ways: Epidemiologists estimate that about 80 percent of the most common diseases are linked to being severely overweight and leading a sedentary lifestyle. Obese people are at an increased risk for cardiovascular diseases, vascular diseases, hypertension, diabetes and cancer. Al this lowers their life expectancy. 

Weight loss and physical activity help to counteract this. Women who lose weight lower their breast cancer risk while regular physical activity lowers the risk of developing breast, colorectal and cervical cancers. 

A University of Granada researcher has a new hypothesis concerning why bacteria seem to becoming increasingly more resistant to antibiotics.

Bacteria are incredibly versatile - they have been found in some of the most extreme conditions on the planet, and it may be just evolution in action. In this instance,  Mohammed Bakkali, a scientist in the Genetics Department at the Faculty of Science of the UGR,
 believes that bacteria that are non-resistant to antibiotics acquire resistance 'accidentally' because they take up the DNA of others that are resistant, due to the stress to which they are subjected. 

Nel 1929 Bruno Rossi, ricercatore presso l’istituto di fisica sperimentale
dell’Università di Firenze [...] intuì quella che sarebbe stata la sua ragione di vita: indagare sulla natura di questi corpuscoli ionizzanti provenienti dall’alto. Doveva realizzare un circuito che permettesse di rivelare e contare le coincidenze che si verificavano in una certa unità di tempo e realizzò uno strumento molto semplice, il circuito a coincidenze.
L’involucro dei tubi Geiger è collegato al polo negativo di una batteria da 1200 volt (non
disegnata). La scarica nei tubi genera un impulso di tensione negativa sulle resistenze da

Sugar is irresistible to humans, and apparently to writers.

There was no better example than this week’s vaygeshray over Mark Bittman’s column in the New York Times. Bittman, the paper’s former food columnist who rose to fame with his fast and easy recipes for modern life, got caught up in one of the biggest food battles on the planet: the sugar wars.

Is sucrose good? Bad? Toxic? Addictive? Causal of illness?