Any dieter can tell you: Body weight is a function of how much food you eat and how much energy you use. The trick to maintaining a healthy weight lies in regulating the balance. Now new research from Rockefeller University suggests that brain cell receptors linked to sex hormones may play a role in the process by which we maintain that balance.

The findings show that metabolic syndrome, a cluster of conditions that includes obesity, insulin resistance and reduced physical activity, occurs in female mice when estrogen signaling in specific areas of the brain is shut down.

“It is well documented that mice missing the gene for estrogen receptor a become obese,” says Pfaff, head of the Laboratory of Neurobiology and Behavior.

Comet McNaught, the Great Comet of 2007, has been delighting those who have seen it with the unaided eye as a spectacular display in the evening sky. Pushing ESO's New Technology Telescope to its limits, a team of European astronomers have obtained the first, and possibly unique, detailed observations of this object.

New research published in the March issue of Psychological Science may help elucidate the relationship between religious indoctrination and violence, a topic that has gained renewed notoriety in the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks. In the article, University of Michigan psychologist Brad Bushman and his colleagues suggest that scriptural violence sanctioned by God can increase aggression, especially in believers.

In 2000, Georgia Tech researchers showed that fluid dynamics theory could be modified to work on the nanoscale, albeit in a vacuum. Now, seven years later they've shown that it can be modified to work in the real world, too – that is, outside of a vacuum. The results appear in the February 9 issue of Physical Review Letters (PRL).

Understanding the motion of fluids is the basis for a tremendous amount of engineering and technology in contemporary life. Planes fly and ships sail because scientists understand the rules of how fluids like water and air behave under varying conditions. The mathematical principle that describe these rules wave put forth more than 100 years ago and are known as the Navier-Stokes equations.

In a thought-provoking paper from the March issue of The Quarterly Review of Biology , Elliott Sober (University of Wisconsin) clearly discusses the problems with two standard criticisms of intelligent design: that it is unfalsifiable and that the many imperfect adaptations found in nature refute the hypothesis of intelligent design.

Biologists from Charles Darwin to Stephen Jay Gould have advanced this second type of argument. Stephen Jay Gould's well-known example of a trait of this type is the panda's thumb. If a truly intelligent designer were responsible for the panda, Gould argues, it would have provided a more useful tool than the stubby proto-thumb that pandas use to laboriously strip bamboo in order to eat it.

ID proponents have a ready reply to this objection.

Northern Nevada energy consumers can be excused if they have a sense of "sticker shock" when their power bills come due following the holiday season. Or, that they have a feeling of powerlessness as the price of gasoline climbs to $3 per gallon.

They wonder: will the days of the $1 tank of gas ever return?

Thanks to research done by a University of Nevada, Reno professor in the area of hydrogen energy generation, soaring power bills could become a thing of the past. And, finding a power source for your car that costs as little as $1 per gallon could also soon become a welcome reality.

Manoranjan Misra, professor of materials science and engineering, recently received a $3 million research grant from the U.S.