The record numbers of young people who took part in last year's presidential election, along with high schools' raised expectations that students participate in community service, have led to growing research on teens' civic beliefs and behavior.

A new study finds that most young people consider civic activity to be obligatory, but their judgments and justifications about different types of civic involvement vary by gender and a variety of other factors.

During a seminar several years ago, University of Chicago paleontologist David Jablonski fielded a hostile question: Why bother classifying organisms according to their physical appearance, let alone analyze their evolutionary dynamics, when molecular techniques had already invalidated that approach?

With more than a few heads in the audience nodding their agreement, Jablonski, the William Kenan Jr. Professor in Geophysical Sciences, saw more work to be done. The question launched him on a rigorous study that has culminated in a new approach to reconciling the conflict between fossil and molecular data in evolutionary studies.

The farthest we have 'seen' in space just got a little farther away, thanks to ESO's Very Large Telescope and GRB (Gamma Ray Burst) 090423.

VLT has shown that a faint gamma-ray burst detected last Thursday is the signature of the explosion of the earliest, most distant known object in the Universe (a redshift of 8.2). The explosion apparently took place more than 13 billion years ago, only about 600 million years after the Big Bang.

Facial recognition is not as automatic as it may seem, according to researchers who have identified specific areas in the brain devoted solely to picking out faces among other objects we encounter.

Two specific effects have been established as being critical for facial recognition – holistic processing (in which we view the face as a whole, instead of in various parts) and left-side bias (in which we have a preference for the left side of the face). Psychologists Janet H. Hsiao from the University of Hong Kong and Garrison W. Cottrell from the University of California, San Diego wanted to test if these effects were specific for facial recognition or if they help us to identify other objects as well.

In 2004, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) launched experiments designed to combine the H5N1 virus and human flu viruses and then see how the resulting hybrids affected animals so that they could assess the chances that such a "reassortant" virus might emerge and determine how dangerous it would be.

Their reasoning was that the worst fears of infectious disease experts - that the H5N1 avian influenza virus  circulating in parts of Asia might combine with a human-adapted flu virus, namely if someone with a flu virus also contracted the avian virus - might result in a deadly new flu virus that could spread around the world.   A pandemic of the kind not seen in almost a hundred years.

In a previous article, I discussed the controversies associated with anthropological research and debunked myths regarding the true intentions of molecular anthropologists.  Furthermore, I also provided examples of Native American communities willing to work with researchers in order to reconstruct their ancestral heritage.   Native Americans, for the most part, are rational and scientists, for the most part, are respectful.