The United States is home to some 40 different species of bat. Thanks to stories of blood-sucking vampire bats, they've somewhat developed the reputation of a fearsome pest, but in fact they are a vital part of our local environment. Many bats can eat their body weight in insects on a single nightly outing. As such they play a huge role in controlling local populations of real pests: disease-spreading insects.

But across the country something devastating is happening, more than a million bats have now been wiped out due to the rampant spread of a fungal infection known as White Nose Syndrome (WNS).

Ever want to build your own launch rail?  Interorbital Systems did, and sent me pictures.

I know, I know, you're thinking "aren't all the cool kids building their own rockets instead?"  Yeah-- and what are they gonna launch them off, huh?  Didn't think that far, huh?  So you're going to show up in a desert or tropical island somewhere with a rocket and be all "where shall I stick this?"  And the locals will be happy to tell you where to stick it.  Trust me, you need a launch rail for your rocket.  It's like the pod for the pea.

Black holes draw audiences, because they are weird, they are profound, they are Albert Einstein and Steven Hawking rolled into a singularity. Or some such – except, none of this is actually the case. The black hole is a much more mundane concept, older than relativity, and despite much misinformation in popular and pseudo science, black holes have in a certain sense little to do with relativity (and I say this although and because I worked for many years on black holes and used general relativity when doing so).

Since you are not Moses, with an omnipotently powerful deity covering your escape, in the situation of a fanatical pharaoh on your trail you may be confused as to how you could part the Red Sea and thus save your People.   Numerical modeling is here to help with some physics.

Tendons connect bones to muscles so if you want to run during a football game or fight a Trojan War, they are important.   If you didn't understand the clever pun in the title, the only vulnerability of Achilles was his calcaneal tendon (tendo calcaneus), because when his mother Thetis dipped him into the magical river Styx to make him invincible, she held him by the heel.

Naturally, it was his undoing.   So today that tendon of the posterior leg is called the Achilles tendon and a devastating weakness in an otherwise strong group or person is colloquially called the Achilles Heel (see Death Star - should we close that 2 meter port that leads to the fusion core?) 

Oxytocin (alpha-hypophamine ) is a nine amino acid peptide more commonly known as a neurotransmitter in the brain - a love hormone.

There have been many studies trying to discern the impact of oxytocin on things like maternal behavior and sex but researchers at Mount Sinai School of Medicine wanted to find out if oxytocin helped us to 'understanding' other people in ordinary social encounters.

Result:  They determined oxytocin selectively improves social cognitive abilities for less socially proficient individuals, but has little effect on those who are more socially proficient. 

A group of researchers are contending obese kids may not be the result of lax parenting or a junk-food culture; obesity may have an infectious origin, according to a cross-sectional study by University of California, San Diego School of Medicine researchers who correlate children exposed to a particular strain of adenovirus, human adenovirus 36 (HAdV-36 or AD-36), being significantly more likely to be obese with some causation. 

It's been hard for archaeologists to pin down the extent of idle wealth in ancient people, but it is generally believed only those in the richest locations, like capital cities, had it.   

A recent discovery, in an urban context and at an orderly archaeological dig, may be of great significance in learning about ancient people outside large cities.  Most small pieces of art originating in the Near East are of unknown origin, having been displaced through illegal antique trade, or purchased by museums and collectors before scientific archaeological research began, but an ornately designed signet ring of Apollo may lend some insight into the economic state of ancient Phoenicians.

Why does exposure to the name Walmart, a brand typically associated with saving money, reduce subsequent spending, but exposure to the Walmart slogan "Save money. Live better" increase it? ask researchers in a Journal of Consumer Research study.   They delve into a strange facet of consumer behavior: people behave differently when they encounter companies' brands than they do when they encounter their slogans.

Last week, I talked about Amazon’s email-in service, which lets you send documents to your Kindle by email. The nicest part of it for me is the PDF conversion feature, but you can, in general, sent any personal documents you like, with or without conversion to AZW.

The way it works is this: