Aww. I cannot bring myself to enter the contest to win a month living in the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.

The website beckons: "Be the experiment. Eat. Sleep. Science." 

But I am not proficient at editing or making videos, a prerequisite. The winner will emerge $10,000 wealthier for interacting with the public, doing experiments and documenting the Month at the Museum experience, October 20 to November 18, 2010. 

What a dream gig!  

In a classic experiment known as the Ultimatum Game, person A is given 10 coins to split between himself and person B. If person B accepts the distribution, they both keep the coins; if not, no one gets paid.

According to Game Theory, the optimal solution is for person A to give himself nine coins and person B one coin——both will end the game richer than when they started. However, played in the wild, the most common distribution is 6-to-4, a ratio seen as fair by both parties.

But why? What's the origin of the human idea of fairness?

Imagine a bullet-proof vest made from a relatively simple protein processed from water - fashionable for those high-risk warzones yet still environmentally terrific.

Ancient people knew about this material 5,000 years ago and even made armor from it but  modern science can't replicate it in a laboratory - though we are getting closer.

The mystery material is silk fiber.   Silk spun by spiders and silk worms combines high strength and extensibility and fundamental discoveries in how silk fibers are made have shown that chemistry, molecular biology and biophysics all play a role in the process. These discoveries have provided the basis for a new generation of applications for silk materials, from medical devices and drug delivery to electronics.

Body checking in hockey, intentionally slamming an opponent against the boards, is regarded as violence under the guise of sports, according to hockey detractors, but injury numbers don't agree - at least in young players.

Findings from a new study show that 66 percent of overall injuries were caused by accidentally hitting the boards or goal posts, colliding with teammates or being hit by a puck.   Only 34 percent of the injuries were caused by checking. Moreover, the accidental injuries were more severe than those from body checks. 

The results appeared in June issue of the British Journal of Sports Medicine and were a surprise to the researchers at the University at Buffalo who conducted the five-year study.