An aerosol mass spectrometer developed by chemists from Aerodyne Research Inc. and Boston College is giving scientists who study airborne particles the technology they need to examine the life cycles of atmospheric aerosols – such as soot – and their impact on issues ranging from climate change to public health.

BC Chemistry Professor Paul Davidovits and Aerodyne Principal Scientist Timothy B. Onasch say their novel spectrometer allows researchers to better understand what happens to these sub-microscopic particles that can absorb and scatter light and influence the lifetime of clouds.

Researchers at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center have disproved a long-standing clinical belief that the hepatitis C virus slows or stunts the immune system's ability to restore itself after HIV patients are treated with a combination of drugs known as the "cocktail."

Hepatitis C (HCV) infection is more serious in HIV-infected people, leading to rapid liver damage, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Intravenous drug use is a main method of contraction for both HIV and HCV and 50 to 90 percent of HIV-infected drug users are also infected with HCV.

An enormous research effort by Europe’s leading broadband players has helped accelerate dramatically the rollout of next-generation broadband services reaching speeds in the 10s of Mbit/s in many European countries. That is just the start.

The deployment of broadband services in the 10s of megabits per second (Mbit/s) is accelerating across the continent, thanks to the research efforts of Europe’s main broadband players. Even 100Mbit/s has become economically feasible and deployments have started.

Two years ago Europe’s leading telecoms, ISP companies, and its top technology vendors and research institutes finished their work on the first phase of the MUSE project. That effort led to a new set of standard specifications for broadband technology branded as the Global System for Broadband (GSB).

Officials from Florida Atlantic University (FAU) and FAU’s Center for Ocean Energy Technology (COET) in the College of Engineering and Computer Science accompanied Florida Governor Charlie Crist on a recent visit to several universities and organizations in the United Kingdom to continue discussions, exchange information and formalize agreements in areas of clean ocean energy, environmental issues and climate change.

Last year, Florida and the UK signed a partnership agreement on global climate change, physically tying one to the other by the Gulf Stream, that massive ocean current which is of critical importance to the present climate and quality of life affecting each partner.

In California it may be the summer of fires as smoke fills the air, but at Yale researchers pump smoke into the lungs of mice in order to help find an explanation behind reactions in smokers due viral infections.

Recent studies by researchers at Yale found that people who smoke have a worse reaction to viral infections not due to a weakened immune system, but because of an overreaction.

If the drinker paradox states that in any pub there is a customer such that, if he or she drinks, everybody in the pub drinks and the diamond-water paradox states that water is more useful than diamonds, yet is a lot cheaper , then the French paradox that the French suffer a relatively low incidence of coronary heart disease despite a diet relatively rich in saturated fats, must certainly be true.

The French paradox became popular on an episode of 60 minutes in 1991 with the incorporation of research supporting, red wine as the reason for the decrease in heart disease. Shortly after the show aired wine sales went up 44 percent.

Since people have asked, here is my take on Stuart Kauffman’s ideas on reductionism and emergence. Kauffman distinguishes between two types of emergence, “epistemological” and “ontological.”

Epistemological emergence is the idea that complex systems cannot be described, as a matter of practice, in terms of their component units because of our epistemic limitations, that is our inability to do the computations. According to ontological emergence, on the other hand, a full understanding of complex systems in terms of their components is not possible in principle, not just because of practical considerations, because new levels of causality appear at higher levels of organization.

According to Peter Olson of the Natural History Museum in London, "All free-living organisms host one or more parasites." This can be taken two ways, both of them generally true: a) that each individual multicellular organism hosts at least one individual parasite within its body, and b) that each free-living species plays host to at least one species of parasite that attacks it exclusively. Consider this second point for a moment. For each free living species there is one or more (usually several more) parasite species -- that is, as a category (polyphyletic, obviously), parasites may very well be the most diverse types of organisms on the planet.

Surcharges. those annoying fees like shipping and handling, have been around since the advent of catalogs and remain in the days of the Internet. Everyone hates them but how many of us base our purchasing decision on these bothersome fees?

Quite a lot, it seems. And not just on Ebay, where sellers make a habit of tacking on outrageous handling charges, but in all aspects of commerce. Basically, the less trustworthy the seller, the more inclined a buyer will balk at surcharges.

The new research published in The Journal of Consumer Research was conducted by Amar Cheema, Ph.D., assistant professor of marketing at Washington University in St. Louis, and he suggests that consumers pay more attention to surcharges overall than previously thought.

Somewhere, people got the idea that girls were not as good at math as boys and that was a cultural issue - discrimination on one side or favoritism on the other - and it had to be fixed, usually with legislation and money for social activists.

Is there any truth to it?

After sifting through mountains of data, including SAT results and math scores from 7 million students who were tested in accordance with the No Child Left Behind Act, a team of scientists reporting in Science says the answer is 'no.' Whether they looked at average performance, the scores of the most gifted children or students' ability to solve complex math problems, girls measured up to boys.