A new study using snow during a Minnesota blizzard gave researchers new insight into the airflow around large wind turbines.

Thanks to subsidies, wind turbines are not going away until at least February of 2017, so improving wind energy efficiency is essential, especially in wind farms where airflows from many large wind turbines interact with each other, a problem that no one included in estimates of cost versus value.

Can emotional states be measured quantitatively?

A team of researchers at KAIST in Daejeon, South Korea has developed a flexible, wearable 20mm x 20mm polymer sensor that can directly measure the degree and occurrence of  piloerection
- commonly known as goose bumps, which is caused by sudden changes in body temperature or emotional states. 

Interesting science and technology, but also a dream for politicians and advertisers. Imagine a world in which real-time physical and emotional response helped to determine the experience of political campaigns, online ads or the temperature in the room. 

Mental fitness tools are all the rage. Companies are pushing out various brain games that claim they can boost cognitive powers. Do they work? Most studies say no but a new paper finds that playing a puzzle game like Cut the Rope for as little as an hour a day led to improved executive functions.

Executive functions in the brain are important for making decisions in everyday life when you have to deal with sudden changes in your environment – better known as thinking on your feet. An example would be when the traffic light turns amber and a driver has to decide in an instant if he will be able to brake in time or if it is safer to travel across the intersection.

Some studies have suggested a link between cannabis use and schizophrenia, but it has remained unclear whether this association is due to cannabis directly increasing the risk of the disorder. 

Cannabis is the most widely used illicit drug in the world, and its use is higher amongst people with schizophrenia than in the general population. Schizophrenia affects approximately 1 in 100 people and people who use cannabis are about twice as likely to develop the disorder. The most common symptoms of schizophrenia are delusions (false beliefs) and auditory hallucinations (hearing voices). The exact cause is unknown. A combination of physical, genetic, psychological and environmental factors can make people more likely to develop the disorder.

It was once the case that computer security for users was a non-issue. Most break-ins of networks involved someone local, not a brute force password discovery. Now, remote hackers in China are constantly hammering US sites using automated tools.

Password security involves a trade-off; complex is good but too complex and people will write it down, which is bad. A new alternative called  'Facelock' is based on the psychology of face recognition.

The Greenland Ice Sheet is huge, a 1.7 million-square-kilometer, 2-mile thick layer of ice that covers Greenland.

In the last 40 years, ice loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet has increased four-fold, contributing to global sea level rise. Some of the melting at the surface of the ice sheet is due to a warmer atmosphere but the ocean's role in driving ice loss largely has been a mystery.

A new paper in Nature Geoscience sheds new light on the connection between the ocean and Greenland's outlet glaciers, and provides important data for future estimates of how fast the ice sheet might melt and how much mass could be lost. 

Writing about the weird soft-bodied fossils found in the Burgess Shale in the Canadian Rockies, paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould noted that of 25 initial body plans exhibited by the fossils, all but four were quickly eliminated.

If we rewound the tape, he asked, and cast the dice once more, would the same four body plans be selected? He thought it unlikely.

Obviously, we can't repeat the Burgess Shale, but Ken Olsen, an associate professor of biology at Washington University in St. Louis, says there are other ways to ask whether evolution is repeatable. One is to look at related species that have independently evolved the same traits and ask if the same genes are responsible and, if so, whether the same mutations led to the trait.

The symptoms of Cushing disease are unmistakable to those who suffer from it – excessive weight gain, acne, distinct colored stretch marks on the abdomen, thighs and armpits, and a lump, or fat deposit, on the back of the neck. Yet the disorder often goes misdiagnosed.