Airlines, hotel companies, anything with a date attached, know they have you on the hook the closer to that date because no one buys airline tickets for tomorrow unless they are desperate, and there are fewer tickets available, so capitalism says you consumers will pay more because they must.

But even William Shatner knows the airline seat or hotel room has no value for the corporation either, once it is gone - he works for a corporation that makes money selling last-minute fares and hotel rooms because it is an asset that expires. That can be your advantage also because airlines and others don't want to fly empty so they often have the 'best' prices on a limited number of seats long in advance in order to break even.   Buying in advance makes sense also.

The United States is home to some 40 different species of bat. Thanks to stories of blood-sucking vampire bats, they've somewhat developed the reputation of a fearsome pest, but in fact they are a vital part of our local environment. Many bats can eat their body weight in insects on a single nightly outing. As such they play a huge role in controlling local populations of real pests: disease-spreading insects.

But across the country something devastating is happening, more than a million bats have now been wiped out due to the rampant spread of a fungal infection known as White Nose Syndrome (WNS).

Black holes draw audiences, because they are weird, they are profound, they are Albert Einstein and Steven Hawking rolled into a singularity. Or some such – except, none of this is actually the case. The black hole is a much more mundane concept, older than relativity, and despite much misinformation in popular and pseudo science, black holes have in a certain sense little to do with relativity (and I say this although and because I worked for many years on black holes and used general relativity when doing so).

Since you are not Moses, with an omnipotently powerful deity covering your escape, in the situation of a fanatical pharaoh on your trail you may be confused as to how you could part the Red Sea and thus save your People.   Numerical modeling is here to help with some physics.

Oxytocin (alpha-hypophamine ) is a nine amino acid peptide more commonly known as a neurotransmitter in the brain - a love hormone.

There have been many studies trying to discern the impact of oxytocin on things like maternal behavior and sex but researchers at Mount Sinai School of Medicine wanted to find out if oxytocin helped us to 'understanding' other people in ordinary social encounters.

Result:  They determined oxytocin selectively improves social cognitive abilities for less socially proficient individuals, but has little effect on those who are more socially proficient. 

A group of researchers are contending obese kids may not be the result of lax parenting or a junk-food culture; obesity may have an infectious origin, according to a cross-sectional study by University of California, San Diego School of Medicine researchers who correlate children exposed to a particular strain of adenovirus, human adenovirus 36 (HAdV-36 or AD-36), being significantly more likely to be obese with some causation. 

It's been hard for archaeologists to pin down the extent of idle wealth in ancient people, but it is generally believed only those in the richest locations, like capital cities, had it.   

A recent discovery, in an urban context and at an orderly archaeological dig, may be of great significance in learning about ancient people outside large cities.  Most small pieces of art originating in the Near East are of unknown origin, having been displaced through illegal antique trade, or purchased by museums and collectors before scientific archaeological research began, but an ornately designed signet ring of Apollo may lend some insight into the economic state of ancient Phoenicians.

Last week, I talked about Amazon’s email-in service, which lets you send documents to your Kindle by email. The nicest part of it for me is the PDF conversion feature, but you can, in general, sent any personal documents you like, with or without conversion to AZW.

The way it works is this: