The anterior insular cortex is a small region of the brain, but it plays a big role in human self-awareness and in neuropsychiatric disorders. A unique cell type, the von Economo neuron (VEN), is located there.  For a long time, the VEN was assumed to be unique to humans, great apes, whales and elephants.

But scientists have recently discovered these brain cells in monkeys. Bring on the self-awareness and empathy?  Not just yet.

I'll tell you a secret a chef told me. That secret is...butter.

There is a reason restaurants that seek to charge the same for 'healthy' fare end up being big flops; people feel cheated eating bean sprouts they can make at their house.  No one cares about how much butter is in a dish when they go to a restaurant because it is a night out, a special occasion.  Calories are basically unimportant and taste remains supreme.  We want to eat something prepared by someone who only cares what we think about its flavor.

Obviously the human body was not designed to eat at a restaurant every evening.  If you do that, and you don't exercise, you are going to get fat. 

A team of Australian scientists has identified new genes that show identifiable changes in the blood of people with bowel cancer.

The discovery has the potential to underpin a new cost-effective blood test that would signal the early stages of bowel cancer. This test could potentially save thousands of lives by supplementing existing screening programs and encouraging those at risk to have a colonoscopy.

The research presented today is the result of over five years of scientific collaboration between Australian biotechnology company Clinical Genomics, CSIRO and the Flinders Centre for Innovation in Cancer at Flinders University in Adelaide, lead by senior investigator Professor Graeme Young.

ET Solar Group Corp. of China has announced completion of two ground-mounted PV power plants in Germany, with total installed capacity of over 9.6MW.

The plants are ground-mounted and are 4MW and 5.6MW by size and are located in Oberröblingen, 100 kilometers west of Leipzig, and Rätzlingen, 100 kilometers from Hamburg respectively. ET Solutions AG, ET Solar's wholly owned subsidiary, performed full engineering, procurement and construction tasks with all PV modules sourced from ET Solar's China plant.

A cap and trade system for carbon dioxide has been a terrific flop; even proponents are leery that it is just another layer of bureaucracy and the only economic benefits have been of the economic voodoo kind, similar to a federal stimulus package that went primarily to state and municipal union employees were called 'jobs saved' in a brilliant bit of marketing.

Why would anyone want to export that fiasco to another environmental issue?  It's academic.  Sometimes academic is obviously a good thing; basic research, for example.  And sometimes 'academic' connotes 'out of touch with reality', like people in the humanities who try and argue that communism really works, it's just that no one has really tried it.