Score one for the nurture side of the nature vs. nurture debate, as North Carolina State University geneticists have shown that environmental factors such as lifestyle and geography play a large role in whether certain genes are turned on or off.

By studying gene expression of white blood cells in 46 Moroccan Amazighs, or Berbers – including desert nomads, mountain agrarians and coastal urban dwellers – the NC State researchers and collaborators in Morocco and the United States showed that up to one-third of genes are differentially expressed due to where and how the Moroccan Amazighs live.

Magnetic confinement fusion could be a safe, environmentally friendly way to provide a substantial part of the world’s energy needs in the 21st century but before that can happen science needs to understand the complex behavior of hot collisionless plasmas (ion gases) in strong magnetic fields.

Such plasmas are subject to temperature and density gradient driven microturbulence which leads to particle and heat losses and tends to keep the plasma from reaching a "burning" state.

Simulations are necessary if we are to understand and control plasma microturbulence but, because fusion plasmas are virtually collisionless, a three-dimensional (i.e., in space) fluid description must, in principle, be abandoned, in favor of a six-dimensional (i.e., in phase space) kinetic one.

John Erdman, a University of Illinois professor of food science and human nutrition who also chairs the Mars, Inc. Scientific Advisory Council and has received millions in funding from Mars, Inc., recognizes that taking money from a candy bar company (Mars Inc.) to do a study of their (Mars Inc.) candy bar proving it is healthy will have skeptics.

Not here. Hey, if Philip-Morris wants to highlight a study saying cigarettes cure cancer or Exxon-Mobil needs to promote a study saying automobile carbon monoxide improves asthma, we won't ridicule them just because of the funding. We'll ridicule them because of the methodology.

“Eating two CocoaVia dark chocolate bars a day not only lowered cholesterol, it had the unexpected effect of also lowering systolic blood pressure,” said Erdman on the results of a peer-reviewed study in The Journal of Nutrition.

Except the participants were also put on the American Heart Association’s “Eating Plan for Healthy Americans” (the Step 1 diet) two weeks before the study started.

While the recent Arctic summer was the warmest on record satellite images from the Antarctic summer have shown the largest sea-ice extent ever recorded, according to the Polarstern expedition. ANT-XXIV/3 was dedicated to examining the oceanic circulation and the oceanic cycles of materials that depend on it. Warming is a lot less global when you get south of Chile, it seems.

In the coming years autonomous measuring buoys will be used to find out whether the cold Antarctic summer induces a new trend or was only a 'slip.'

Under the direction of Dr. Eberhard Fahrbach, Oceanographer at the Alfred Wegener Institute, 58 scientists from ten countries were on board the research vessel Polarstern in the Southern Ocean from 6 February until 16 April, 2008. They studied ocean currents as well as the distribution of temperature, salt content and trace substances in Antarctic sea water.

We're a long way from machine cognition but scientist are making improvements, mostly in recognition. Researchers have managed to teach a computer’s vision system to recognise up to 100 objects.

But there is another radically different approach available that European researchers have applied to the study of robotics and AI. The MACS project does not attempt to get robots to perceive what something is, but how it can be used.

This is an application of the cognitive theory of ‘affordances’, developed by the American psychologist James J. Gibson between 1950 and 1979. He rejected behaviourism and proposed a theory of ‘affordances’, a term signifying the range of possible interactions between an individual and a particular object or environment. The theory focuses on what a thing or environment enables a user to do.

Using a multidisciplinary mix of geometry, biological research and techniques developed to solve problems on supercomputers, scientists at the University of California, San Diego have shown for the first time how a genome is organized in three-dimensional space.

Researchers led by Cornelis Murre, a professor of biology at UC San Diego, and Steve Cutchin, senior scientist for visualization services at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), used the gene encoding the immunoglobulin heavy chain locus — responsible for generating diverse kinds of antibodies — to demonstrate the structure of the genome.

The observations, the researchers say, permit an insight into the structure of the human genome, which until now has remained elusive.

The government of Cameroon has created the Kagwene Gorilla Sanctuary, the world’s first sanctuary exclusively for the Cross River gorilla, the world’s rarest kind of great ape.

“The creation of this sanctuary is the fruit of many years of work in helping to protect the world’s rarest gorilla subspecies,” said Dr. Roger Fotso, Director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Cameroon Program, which worked in tandem with the Cameroon Ministry of Forestry and Wildlife in laying the groundwork for the sanctuary.

Classified as Critically Endangered by IUCN’s Red List, the Cross River gorilla is the rarest of the four subspecies of gorilla. The entire population numbers under 300 individuals across its entire range, which consists of 11 scattered sites in Cameroon and Nigeria.

Looking on the bright side can lead to irresponsible financial behavior, says Elizabeth Cowley from the University of Sydney. In a series of studies, Cowley examined repeated gambling in the face of loss. She finds that people often engage in too much positive thinking, selectively focusing on one win among hundreds of losses when they think back on the overall experience.

“When we want to justify engaging in an activity which could potentially be irresponsible – like gambling – we may need to distort our memory of the past to rationalize the decision,” Cowley explains. “People who have frequently spent more money than planned on gambling edit their memories of the past in order to justify gambling again.”

A genetic variation protects some people with heart failure, enabling them to live longer than expected, according to a research team led by investigators at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore and the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

The researchers found that the genetic variation acts just like beta-blockers, a class of drugs used to treat chronic heart failure.

In the study, the researchers found that black heart failure patients with the genetic variation had a natural protection against death and the need for a heart transplant that is the same as the protection provided by beta-blocker therapy.

A close binary system of two candidate black holes in the quasar OJ 287 has shown Einstein some physics love. A central black hole, with a mass equal to 18 billion times that of the Sun, is orbited by a smaller one, and the interaction of the system with its surroundings produces brightness changes that allow astronomers to study the evolution of the orbit.

This evolution is dominated by one of the most intriguing predictions of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity: the emission of gravitational waves.

Astronomers believe that very massive black holes lurk at the centers of most galaxies but, as in the case of our own Galaxy, they often remain silent and are difficult to detect. In other cases where the black holes are surrounded by disks of material that fall onto them (accretion disks), the infalling material is heated and emits huge quantities of radiation: the active nucleus of a galaxy can appear, then, as a quasar.