Though women work in corporations and serve at higher levels of organizations more than at any time in world history, sociologists note that they still lag behind men in one high-profile way; fraud.

Obviously cultural critics can argue that women are being left behind in opportunities to commit fraud because they do not have equal numbers at the highest levels, but that is a self-correcting problem over time. Regardless of the gender landscape, the sociologists who examined a database of recent corporate frauds found that women typically were not part of the conspiracy. When women did play a role, it was rarely a significant one.

Toxicologist Edward Calabrese of the University of Massachusetts Amherst has dropped cultural bombs on both the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and two scientists who provided crucial information for Atomic Age carcinogen risk assessment.

Regarding the linear no threshold (LNT) dose-response approach to ionizing radiation exposure in the 1950s, Calabrese says there was deliberate suppression of evidence to prevent the regulatory panel from considering an alternative, threshold model - the LNT model was later generalized to chemical carcinogen risk ssessment.

Thanks to athletes like Ryan Braun and Lance Armstrong, doping has gotten a bad rap, but if solar power is ever going to be viable, doping will be essential.

Flexible thin film solar cells require fewer materials and can be manufactured in large quantities by roll-to-roll processing. One such technology relies on cadmium telluride (CdTe), which is a distant second to silicon-based solar cells but cheap in terms of production costs. Because they are grown on rigid glass plates, these superstrate cells have, however a big drawback: they require a transparent supporting material that lets sunlight pass through to reach the light-harvesting CdTe layer, thus limiting the choice of carriers to transparent materials.

The nature of hypnotically suggested changes in perception has been controversial throughout the history of hypnosis. 

The major current hypotheses of hypnosis hold that we always actively use our own imagination to bring about the effects of a suggestion - for example, the occurrence of visual hallucinations always requires active use of goal directed imagery and can be experienced both with and without hypnosis. In other words, it isn't really hypnosis, but people susceptible to suggestion become more so when drowsy.

Excavations of tools at two neighboring Paleolithic sites in southwest France have made the blurred lines between modern humans and Neanderthals more blurry. 

Two research teams from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and the University of Leiden in the Netherlands have jointly reported the discovery of Neandertal bone tools unlike any others previously found in Neandertal sites - but similar to a tool from later modern human sites and still and still used even today. 

Researchers have measured light emitted by photoluminescence from a nanodiamond levitating in free space. 

Their paper describes how they used a laser to trap nanodiamonds in space, and – using another laser – caused the diamonds to emit light at given frequencies.

The experiment, led by Nick Vamivakas, an assistant professor of optics at the University of Rochester, demonstrates that it is possible to levitate diamonds as small as 100 nanometers (approximately one-thousandth the diameter of a human hair) in free space, by using a technique known as laser trapping.  Specifically, nitrogen vacancy (NV) photoluminescence (PL) from a nanodiamond suspended in a free-space optical dipole trap.

Ice ages and warm periods have alternated fairly regularly in the Earth's history: 90,000 of every 100,000 years in the past had vast areas of North America, Europe and Asia being buried under thick ice sheets.

Eventually, the pendulum swings back, it gets warmer and the ice masses melt. 

There's solid evidence of this 100,000-year cycle in glacial moraines, marine sediments and arctic ice, but a plausible explanation for it is harder to find.  

A plastic material already used in absorbable surgical sutures could also administer antibiotics to patients with brain infections, scientists report in a new study. Use of the material, placed directly on the brain's surface, could reduce the need for weeks of costly hospital stays now required for such treatment, they say in the journal ACS Chemical Neuroscience.