As the world grows more social and connects more online, privacy management is becoming more collaborative, according to Penn State researchers.

"This is a paradigm shift, in a lot of ways, because most people think of privacy as being individualistic, but privacy is no longer just about the individual, it's also a collaborative and coordinated process," said Haiyan Jia, a postdoctoral scholar in information sciences and technology.

Mysterious spectacular mounds found in the earth in tropical wetlands in South America are created by earthworms, researchers have found.

The densely packed, regularly spaced mounds cover large areas of the Orinoco Llanos in Columbia and Venezuela. Until now it was not known how they were formed.

A new study shows these mounds, called surales, are largely made up of earthworm casts, heaps of muddy soil ejected by their guts. This is the first research to describe their formation.

Want to see social inequality and how it impacts obesity? Look at takeout food in your neighborhood - and in the halls of Cambridge.

Yet the halls of Cambridgee are where a new paper claims takeout food is an indicator of social inequality. Obviously elites at Cambridge have a long and cherished history to gaze upon, including one in which a feudal system made sure poor people were never overweight. Today, there is more equality than ever, poor people can afford to be fat, but the Cambridge scholars believe that even cheap food is a way of promoting oppression.

The Centre for Diet and Activity Research (CEDAR) at the University of Cambridge mapped takeout food to obesity and income. Prestige, the kind of paper British comic John Oliver just ridiculed is born:

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria most often are associated with hospitals and other health-care settings, but a new study indicates that chicken coops and sewage treatment plants also are hot spots of antibiotic resistance.

The research, led by a team at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, is published May 12 in Nature.

The scientists surveyed bacteria and their capacity to resist antibiotics in a rural village in El Salvador and a densely populated slum on the outskirts of Lima, Peru. In both communities, the researchers identified areas ripe for bacteria to shuffle and share their resistance genes. These hot spots of potential resistance transmission included chicken coops in the rural village and a modern wastewater treatment plant outside Lima.

Scientists from Princeton University and NASA have confirmed that 1,284 objects observed outside Earth's solar system by NASA's Kepler spacecraft are indeed planets. Reported in The Astrophysical Journal on May 10, it is the largest single announcement of new planets to date and more than doubles the number of confirmed planets discovered by Kepler so far to more than 2,300.

A new study from Tel Aviv University, Cornell University and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine reveals genetic proof of the Jewish roots of the Bene Israel community in the western part of India. They have always considered themselves Jewish.

"Almost nothing is known about the Bene Israel community before the 18th century, when Cochin Jews and later Christian missionaries first came into contact with it," says first author Yedael Waldman of both TAU's Department of Molecular Microbiology and Cornell's Department of Biological Statistics and Computational Biology. "Beyond vague oral history and speculations, there has been no independent support for Bene Israel claims of Jewish ancestry, claims that have remained shrouded in legend."

Roses are red, violets are blue. Everybody knows that, but what makes them so? Although plant breeders were aware of some of the genes involved, there was as yet no quantitative study of how pigment turns a flower red, blue or yellow. Casper van der Kooi conducted just such a study, combining biology and physics.

A new claims the epigenetics of lactose intolerance may provide an approach to understanding schizophrenia - perhaps because both lactose intolerance and schizophrenia are inherited and neither condition emerges in the first years of life and in a booming fad like epigenetics, that is all you need. 

More than 65 per cent of adults worldwide are lactose intolerant and cannot process the milk sugar lactose. Lactose intolerance is influenced by one gene, which determines if a person will lose the ability to process lactose over time. More specifically, those with some variants of this gene will gradually produce less lactase, the enzyme that breaks down lactose, as they age.