There has long been an on-again, off-again debate about the health effects of red wine. Is it killing our liver or is it preventing the next pandemic? It appears scientists from Scotland and Singapore have answered this question.

Red wine is healthy because the resveratrol it contains controls inflammation. But how? New research published in the August 2009 print issue of The FASEB Journal (http://www.fasebj.org), not only explains resveratrol's one-two punch on inflammation, but also show how it—or a derivative—can be used to treat potentially deadly inflammatory disease, such as appendicitis, peritonitis, and systemic sepsis.

A University of Exeter research team recently tested squirrels' ability to learn to choose between two pots of food after watching another squirrel remove a nut from one of the pots.

One group was rewarded for choosing the same pot as the previous squirrel, the second group was rewarded for targeting the other pot. Those that were rewarded for choosing food from the other pot learned more quickly than those that were rewarded for choosing the same pot. This suggests that grey squirrels learn more quickly to recognize the absence of food.

If you're an ordinary, law-abiding citizen in the UK, you can't own a gun.  So who owns them?  Criminals, of course, making crimes easier to commit.   But it isn't just organized crime and the assumption that gangs are most often at the root of gun crime in the UK is overstated, according to a study published today in Criminology and Criminal Justice.  In their paper, professor Simon Hallsworth and Dr Daniel Silverstone suggest that while gangs certainly exist, they are not involved in most illegal shootings.

In one of the largest studies examined, the Home Office conducted 80 structured interviews with young people involved with weapons, visiting UK cities with high levels of gun crime and penal establishments.

Tangential Science: it's not necessarily science, but it's still funny.

1. In an overhyped analysis certain to make biologists want to reach for their pistols, it has been declared that women are evolving to be more beautiful:

"Evolution has led to women, but not men, getting progressively beautiful, according to scientists" it reads.

Besides the usual share of random readers who google something and get directed here by mere chance (to be read: by the sheer amount of valuable information I have posted here), this blog is read by an interesting mix of particle physicists, students, experts in other fields of Physics, and Science amateurs -plus a small number of science reporters looking for news.

Of course I love each and every one of my faithful readers like good teachers love their pupils, but among the varied crowd, the readers which I am most happy to host here are students and amateurs, because they provide me with true motivation for spending my time writing popularization articles. Without them, many of my posts would lose their meaning.

A new study in Nature offers an explanation for the origin of dwarf spheroidal galaxies, one of the current puzzles in our understanding of galaxy formation.

Dwarf spheroidal galaxies are small and very faint, containing few stars relative to their total mass. They appear to be made mostly of dark matter - a mysterious substance detectable only by its gravitational influence, which outweighs normal matter by a factor of five to one in the universe as a whole.