There is some good news for consumers with a sweet tooth. Cornell food scientists have reduced the sweetener stevia's bitter aftertaste by physical - rather than chemical - means.

Cornell professor of food process engineering, Syed Rizvi, co-authored the research "Controlling the Taste Receptor Accessible Structure of Rebaudioside A via Binding to Bovine Serum Albumin," with Samriddh Mudgal, the lead author and former graduate student in Rizvi's lab at Cornell; Ivan Keresztes, director of Cornell's NMR facility in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, and Gerald W. Feigenson, professor of biochemistry, molecular and cell biology.

Everyone seems to know what the revenue of movies are, the film "Jem" and the new biopic of Steve Jobs being pulled from theaters after disastrous receptions are well known, but less known is that the video game industry is bigger - and therefore the budgets for games are sometimes as big.

Oklahoma is in the news a lot for earthquakes because of activist claims about hydraulic fracturing, the modern process of natural gas extraction.

In reality, the earthquakes may be linked to conventional drilling but the numbers are nothing out of the ordinary - and those are nothing compared to just southern California, which has 30 every day. That's due to the San Andreas Fault system.

Cities that line the fault, like Los Angeles and San Francisco, have been fortunate for the last 100 years - there hasn't been a major destructive earthquake of magnitude 7.5 or more -- but it's coming. Large earthquakes occur at about 150-year intervals on the San Andreas, so the next 'big one' is near.

The long history of severe droughts across Europe and the Mediterranean has largely been told through historical documents and ancient journals but an atlas based on scientific evidence uses tree rings to map the reach and severity of dry and wet periods across Europe, parts of North Africa and the Middle East, year to year over the past 2,000 years.

The Old World Drought Atlas significantly adds to the historical picture of long-term climate variability over the Northern Hemisphere. In so doing, it should help climate scientists pinpoint causes of drought and extreme rainfall in the past, and identify patterns that could lead to better climate model projections for the future. 

Many patients with serious diseases are not helped by their medications because treatment is started too late. An international research team led from Linköping University is launching a unique strategy for discovering a disease progression in its earliest phase.

The study, to be published in Science Translational Medicine, has been led by Professor Mikael Benson and Dr Mika Gustafsson at the Centre for Individualized Medication (CIMed).

"We're addressing one of the biggest problems in healthcare, one that leads to a great deal of suffering and enormous costs in terms of drugs and drug development. An important reason for this is that treatment is often not started until the patient has enough symptoms for a diagnosis using conventional methods," says Prof Benson.

Recent experiments at the Large Plasma Device (LAPD) at the University of California, Los Angeles, have successfully excited elusive plasma waves, known as whistler-mode chorus waves, which have hitherto only been observed in the Earth's near-space environment. These chorus waves were accidentally discovered as early as World War I by radio operators deploying long lines intended to intercept enemy communication, and were subsequently dubbed "dawn chorus" since the sound of the radio signal when played through loudspeakers sounded like the distant chirping of a rookery of birds.

For more than 60 years, fusion scientists have tried to use "magnetic bottles" of various shapes and sizes to confine extremely hot plasmas, with the goal of producing practical fusion energy. But turbulence in the plasma has, so far, confounded researchers' ability to efficiently contain the intense heat within the core of the fusion device, reducing performance. Now, scientists have used one of the world's largest supercomputers to reveal the complex interplay between two types of turbulence known to occur in fusion plasmas, paving the way for improved fusion reactor design.

You know our eyelids blink but less know is that so does the human brain, dropping a few frames of visual information here and there.

Those lapses of attention come fast -- maybe just once every tenth of a second. But some people may be missing more than others, according to psychologists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

"Intuitively we have this sense that we're viewing the world in a continuous stream, constantly taking in the same amount of information," says Jason Samaha, a University of Wisconsin-Madison doctoral student in psychology. "So if I told people that every 100 milliseconds their brains were taking a bit of a break, I think that would surprise a lot of them."