Researchers studying Rhesus Macaque mothers and writing on their results in Current Biology have determined that interactions of macaque mothers with their infants have a lot of similarity to human mothers in the first month of a newborn's life.
"What does a mother or father do when looking at their own baby?" asks Pier Francesco Ferrari of the Università di Parma in Italy. "They smile at them and exaggerate their gestures, modify their voice pitch—the so-called "motherese"—and kiss them. What we found in mother macaques is very similar: they exaggerate their gestures, "kiss" their baby, and have sustained mutual gaze."
No country is immune from gender discrimination, says the World Economic Forum's Gender Gap Report, and most companies feel like they are gender neutral and perhaps are - but because people and perceptions are different it's dificult to say what is discrimination and what is sensitivity or even militancy.
It's not to say there aren't disparities - "No country in the world has yet managed to eliminate the gender gap" they write in the report. But it may be more looking for causation in the correlation than entrenche discrimination.
If you're a child of the 1970s you remember peak oil - it was a book that claimed by 1992 we were going to reach maximum capacity and then it would gradually become more scarce. If you're a fan of science fiction, it meant a world where oil was worth more than gold and we put machine guns on cars to fight over stuff. More likely, we would come up with an alternative, but not before government lobbyists got subsidies for things we know won't work.
A new type of rocket propellant made from a mixture of water and nanoscale aluminum powder could be manufactured on the moon or Mars or any place remnant ice may exist, say researchers from NASA, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Purdue and Pennsylvania State University who believe their aluminum-ice, or ALICE, propellant could be used to launch rockets into orbit from Earth as a pit stop for long-distance space missions. Since it's greener than current propellants it will also be acceptable to those of you concerned about universal global warming(1).
They say the world is changing. Let’s check that out empirically.
We might run a couple of sample surveys, to see how people’s behaviors or attitudes change between the two questionnaire mailings. A colleague, however, suggests panel sampling.
Herbal medicines are more common in Asian countries to treat pre-diabetes (impaired glucose tolerance or IGT), the precursor of diabetes but is there any hard scientific evidence to confidently recommend their use?
No. That doesn't mean they aren't a viable treatment but, or that they haven't worked in some people, just like the confounding placebo effect, but more research would be needed to establish whether Chinese herbal medicines can reduce the likelihood of developing diabetes the way advocates claim.
A study combining family- and population-based approaches has uncovered a single-letter change in the genetic code that is associated with autism. The finding implicates a neuronal gene not previously tied to the disorder and more broadly, underscores a role for common DNA variation. In addition, the new research highlights two other regions of the genome, which are likely to contain rare genetic differences that may also influence autism risk.
Soon the world will learn who won the 2009 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Do you remember Peter Agre and Roderick MacKinnon of the following announcement?
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2003
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2003 “for discoveries concerning channels in cell membranes”, with one half of the prize to
Peter Agre
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, USA
“for the discovery of water channels”
and one half of the prize to
Roderick MacKinnon
Howard Hughes Medical Institute, The Rockefeller University, New York, USA
“for structural and mechanistic studies of ion channels”. [1]
Two Cell Membrane Channels
There is a subset of people in the environmental conservation movement who hate their fellow man - they like nature but don't think anyone outside of their companies should enjoy it, they should just pay companies to raise money for advocacy.
Do you remember the "e-e-gamma-gamma-met" event ? I am sure you do not. It is an incredibly striking event that appeared toward the end of the Tevatron Run I in the CDF data. One event that was so incredibly striking, so impossible to produce through standard model processes, that many in my experiment felt sure that it was going to be the portal through which we would enter the realm of Supersymmetry, or other fancy new physics scenarios.
