Here's a development that could have significant implications for electrochemistry, biochemistry, electrical engineering and many other fields: a Nature Materials paper is about computer simulations which find that the electrical conductivity of many materials increases with a strong electrical field in a universal way. 

Electrical conductivity is a measure of how strongly a given material conducts the flow of electric current and is generally understood in terms of Ohm's law, which states that the conductivity is independent of the magnitude of an applied electric field, i.e. the voltage per meter. This law is widely obeyed in weak applied fields, which means that most material samples can be ascribed a definite electrical resistance, measured in Ohms.

I wrote before about the controversy involving the release earlier this year of a genome sequence of the HeLa cell line, which was taken without consent from Henrietta Lacks as she lay dying of ovarian cancer in 1950s Baltimore.

Now, the NIH has announced an agreement with Lacks’ descendants to obtain their consent for access to and use of the HeLa genome (the agreement applies only to NIH funded research, but the hope is that others will agree to it as well).

A young child buried in the medieval town of Ribe in Denmark 800 years ago had an unpleasant life even before that - because the child had been given a large dose of mercury in an attempt to cure a severe, ongoing illness. 

A new methodology developed by chemist Kaare Lund Rasmussen from University of Southern Denmark and colleagues can reveal an unprecedented amount of details about the time even shortly before a person's death. Mercury is of particular interest for the archaeologists as many cultures in different part of the world have been in contact with the rare (and toxic) element.

Surveys show that people have less empathy for battered human adults than they do dogs, according to a paper at the American Sociological Association.

Jack Levin  and Arnold Arluke, sociology professors at Northeastern University, used the opinions of 240 men and women, most of whom were white and between the ages of 18-25 (college students), at a large northeastern university (guess which one) who randomly received one of four fictional news articles about; the beating of a one-year-old child, an adult in his thirties, a puppy, or a 6-year-old dog. The stories were identical except for the victim's identify. After reading their story, respondents were asked to rate their feelings of empathy towards the victim.

Do you remember the X(3872) ? This is a hadron containing charm and anticharm quarks, which was observed to decay into a J/Psi meson, a positive, and a negative pion. When it was discovered, by the Belle experiment in 2003, the X caused a lot of interest among spectroscopists, because it is an "exotic" charmonium state: its nature is not totally clear, as it might be interpreted as a "molecule" of two charmed mesons loosely bound together. Or maybe a four-quark system ? Or just conventional charmonium, a bit at odds with the expected set of spin-parity states but otherwise just a honest meson ?

Cocaine use may cause profound metabolic changes which can result in dramatic weight gain during recovery, a distressing phenomenon that can lead to relapse - the reason is because chronic cocaine use may reduce the body's ability to store fat, the authors of a new paper suggest.

It is widely believed that cocaine suppresses the appetite and that the problematic weight gain during rehabilitation was a result of patients substituting food for drugs.