A new study says that the human brain lives "on the edge of chaos", at a critical transition point between randomness and order.   Theoretical speculation?  Well, yeah, but that's the nature of neuroscience.

The researchers say self-organized criticality (where systems spontaneously organize themselves to operate at a critical point between order and randomness), can emerge from complex interactions in many different physical systems, including avalanches, forest fires, earthquakes, and heartbeat rhythms.

Kids love sweet-tasting foods and new research indicates that this heightened liking for sweetness has a biological basis and is related to children's high growth rate.

Liking sweets is a cross-cultural phenomenon for kids, a pattern that declines during adolescence. To explore the biological underpinnings of this shift, Researchers looked at sweet preference and biological measures of growth and physical maturation in 143 children between the ages of 11 and 15.  

SHANGHAI, March 19 /PRNewswire/ -- The Soitec Group (Euronext Paris), the world's leading supplier of silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafers and other engineered substrates for the microelectronics industry, announced today a new partnership with a distributor in China to strengthen its Far East presence. A member of the Shanghai Semiconductor Association, Cantang Electronics Technology Inc. is a professional service provider specialized in semiconductors, with staff and engineers that understand SOI technology and its markets. Under the new partnership agreement, Cantang Electronics will distribute, market and support Soitec's products and services throughout China.

Bell curves are everywhere. Pick 100 random people and measure them: measure their height, their weight, their blood pressure, their time to run a mile, or to sprint 50 yards, and their IQ, and you find that most of us fall in the middle of the spectrum, while there are always some people on either extreme. Why?

The puzzle grows deeper when you think about genetics. If a trait like height is controlled largely by genes, how is it that height falls into a bell-curve pattern? Bell-curves seem completely at odds with what we learn about the discrete genetics of Mendel's round and wrinkled peas in high school biology.

It turns out that the solution to this puzzle is fairly simple (although the details get messy). In fact, Darwin's cousin hit on the right answer (long before he or anyone else knew about Mendel's genetics), with what he called the "Supreme Law of Unreason": a bell curve is exactly what you expect when you toss together "a large sample of chaotic elements." In other words, genetics is like one big game of The Price Is Right.

WASHINGTON, March 18 /PRNewswire/ --

The Vatican has yet again been forced to revise statements made by Pope Benedict XVI as he embarked on a foreign trip. En route to Cameroon on March 17, the pope claimed that condom use would aggravate the problem of HIV.

A transcript of the pope's comments on the Vatican's Web site altered the comment to suggest that condoms risked aggravating the problem.

Jon O'Brien, president of Catholics for Choice, welcomed the change as a sign that the pope is not infallible on this issue and is willing to acknowledge his mistakes.

MIGDAL HA'EMEK, Israel, March 18 /PRNewswire/ --

How did life begin, anyway?

     I am a research professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and over the past 30 years my students and I have been working to understand how cellular life arose. The unit of all life today is the cell, a molecular system of functional polymers (proteins and nucleic acids) that is bounded by a membrane composed of lipid.

New treatments for infertility could be closer to reality, thanks to a discovery from scientists at the Université de Montréal and Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital Research Centre.

According to a study published in the journal Molecular Human Reproduction, the researchers have become the first to clone, produce and purify a protein important for sperm maturation, termed Binder of Sperm (BSP), which may have implications for both fertility treatments and new methods of male contraception.

MADISON, Wisconsin, March 18 /PRNewswire/ --

The Dutch higher education market is one of the world's most advanced in lecture capture and Technical University of Delft leads the pack, recording 80 class hours that attract 10,000 views - each and every week. But the widespread success of this ambitious campus program did not come without the usual challenges.

Sonic Foundry, Inc. (Nasdaq: SOFO), the recognized market leader for rich media webcasting and knowledge management, will host a webinar in which Leon Huijbers will discuss how he and his Multimedia Department overcame the space, funding and workforce shortages that initially threatened the lecture capture initiative.

STOCKHOLM, Sweden, March 18 /PRNewswire/ -- Today marks the European launch of FIRMAGON(R) (degarelix), a new treatment option in hormonal therapy for prostate cancer, with details presented at the 24th Annual European Association of Urology (EAU) Congress in Stockholm. FIRMAGON(R) is a new GnRH receptor blocker indicated for the treatment of patients with advanced hormone-dependent prostate cancer.