Democratic consultant Donna Brazile brought home America’s reluctance to talk openly about race in a New York Times article that preceded the Barack Obama speech that now has the whole nation buzzing. In essence, she said in her quote, any serious discussion about race has the effect of clearing a room.

Brazile’s remark and the presidential hopeful’s groundbreaking speech about a subject that politicians generally tiptoe around in public hint at the complexities of race relations in America today. As we approach the second decade of the 21st century, research shows that many Americans feel anxious during interracial interactions whether or not race is even mentioned.

Now a new study from Northwestern University suggests that whites who are particularly worried about appearing racist seem to suffer from anxiety that instinctively may cause them to avoid interaction with blacks in the first place.

Researchers at the University of Rochester have digitally reproduced music in a file nearly 1,000 times smaller than a regular MP3 file - a a 20-second clarinet solo encoded in less than a single kilobyte.

The achievement, announced today at the International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing held in Las Vegas, is not yet a flawless reproduction of an original performance, but the researchers say it's getting close.

"This is essentially a human-scale system of reproducing music," says Mark Bocko, professor of electrical and computer engineering and co-creator of the technology. "Humans can manipulate their tongue, breath, and fingers only so fast, so in theory we shouldn't really have to measure the music many thousands of times a second like we do on a CD. As a result, I think we may have found the absolute least amount of data needed to reproduce a piece of music."

As gas prices continue to climb, alternative fuels get a lot of attention but how close are they?

Scientists atArgonne National Laboratory are working to chemically manipulate algae for production of the next generation of renewable fuels – hydrogen gas.

Some varieties of algae, a kind of unicellular plant, contain an enzyme called hydrogenase that can create small amounts of hydrogen gas. Tiede said many believe this is used by Nature as a way to get rid of excess reducing equivalents that are produced under high light conditions, but there is little benefit to the plant.

In the Northern hemisphere, winter is the time for the flu. Every year 5% to 20% of us catch "the bug". So predictable is the influenza virus that "flu season" has entered the vernacular. This year, flu cases peaked around the end of February (see chart). Perhaps you've wondered "Why?".

Hypotheses for flu season are numerous and include:

AIDS may partly be the consequence of an evolutionary accident, said Professor Frank Kirchhoff from the University of Ulm in Germany. at the Society for General Microbiology’s 162nd meeting being held this week at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre.

“AIDS is a deadly disease in people that is caused by human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). But similar viruses such as simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), which infects monkeys, usually don’t cause disease in their natural monkey hosts,” says Kirchhoff.

Previous studies have established that one of the key differences between the way HIV-1 behaves in humans and closely related SIVs behave in monkeys is that when humans are infected with HIV-1 the immune system becomes highly stimulated. This means critical defence cells called helper T cells are continuously activated and die more quickly than usual.

Here's a myth many men are happy has been debunked - contrary to popular thinking about the need for hours of sexual activity, a survey of U.S. and Canadian sex therapists says satisfactory sexual intercourse for couples lasts from 3 to 13 minutes.

Penn State Erie researchers Eric Corty and Jenay Guardiani conducted a survey of 50 full members of the Society for Sex Therapy and Research, which include psychologists, physicians, social workers, marriage/family therapists and nurses who have collectively seen thousands of patients over several decades.

Thirty-four, or 68 percent, of the group responded and rated a range of time amounts for sexual intercourse, from penetration of the vagina by the penis until ejaculation, that they considered adequate, desirable, too short and too long.

Common sense says that we are happier when we get more money to spend on ourselves. At least, that’s what passes for commonsense in modern capitalistic societies, from the United States to China.  Indeed, when Elizabeth Dunn and colleagues at the University of British Columbia and at Harvard Business School asked a bunch of their students (the usual subjects in social science studies), that’s exactly what they found: students thought they would be happier getting $20 than $5, and that they would be happier spending the money on themselves than on others.

Turns out, the students were spectacularly wrong.

Research over the past several years has steadily contradicted the capitalistic assumption about human nature. For instance, it is well known that there is only a weak correlation between income level and self-reported happiness across the globe, with the relationship plateauing (meaning that additional money does not increase happiness) at surprisingly low levels of income. And yet, people keep playing the lottery, or its white collar equivalent, the stock market. Why?

Less than three months after forecasters announced the beginning of a new solar cycle (cycle 24), that has been changed. Solar Cycle 23 is still kicking.

Last week, three sunspots appeared and their magnetic polarity says they are all old cycle spots. ESA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) Project Scientist Bernhard Fleck says, “If cycle 24 had already begun, the magnetic polarity of the spots would be reversed.”

Two solar cycles? At the same time?

It sounds strange but it is normal. Around the time of solar minimum - which is now - old-cycle spots and new-cycle spots frequently intermingle. Eventually Cycle 23 will fade to zero, giving way in full to Solar Cycle 24, but not yet.

Plants, crops and trees naturally absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) during photosynthesis and then pump surplus carbon through their roots into the earth around them. In most soils, this carbon can escape back to the atmosphere or enters groundwater.

Knowing this, a team from Newcastle University aims to design soils that can remove carbon from the atmosphere, permanently and cost-effectively using soils containing calcium-bearing silicates.

Calcium silicates are minerals that occur naturally in many different rocks and also in artificial materials such as concrete.

Astronomers have spied a faraway star system that is so unusual, it was one of a kind - and then its discovery helped them pinpoint a second one much closer to home.

They discovered the first star system 13 million light years away, tucked inside Holmberg IX, a small galaxy that is orbiting the larger galaxy M81. They studied it between January and October 2007 with the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) on Mt. Graham in Arizona.

The star system is unusual, because it’s what the astronomers have called a “yellow supergiant eclipsing binary” -- it contains two very bright, massive yellow stars that are very closely orbiting each other. In fact, the stars are so close together that a large amount of stellar material is shared between them, so that the shape of the system resembles a peanut.