The Appalachian mountain chain runs along a nearly straight line from Alabama to Newfoundland— 1,500 miles - except for a curious bend in Pennsylvania and New York.

Why it bends has been a mystery. When the North American and African continental plates collided more than 300 million years ago, the North American plate began folding and thrusting upwards as it was pushed westward into the dense underground rock structure—in what is now the northeastern United States. The dense rock created a barricade, forcing the Appalachian mountain range to spring up.  Yet the bend was cause for speculation.

Though there is a deluge of new information about the diversity and distribution of plants and animals around the globe, conservation efforts outside government science remain very firmly trapped in a 1980s world of fundraising and brochures and cultural name-calling.

But Big Data in a Science 2.0 environment could dramatically boost conservation efforts and biodiversity if it catches on.

The human papilloma virus (HPV) is common in humans but it can lead to infection and even cancer so there have been calls to get people vaccinated. 4,000 women will die each year from cervical cancer, which is linked to HPV, and HPV can also cause genital warts and more rare forms of cancer. The two vaccines in use, made by GlaxoSmithKline and Merck, prevent about 70 percent of cervical cancer cases and the CDC estimates that 7,000 HPV-associated cancers might be prevented each year with HPV vaccines but uptake has been limited because medical professionals don't like that there have been tens of thousands of adverse reaction reports.

A new study finds that the HPV test alone may be valuable. A study

They say money can't buy happiness. Can genetics?

Some people seem to be happy no matter what. If you visit many places in Africa, even when the existence may seem hard to Europeans or Americans, a lot of people are quite happy.

The key could be genetics say....economists.

Why not economists? We let sociologists and anthropologists make all kinds of claims and they don't understand statistics anywhere near as well as the economists from the University of Warwick Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy.

Have physicists conquered the scaling behavior of exotic giant molecules?

When a two-body relation becomes a three-body relation, the behavior of the system changes. The basic physics of two interacting particles is well understood but the mathematical description of a three- or many-body system becomes so difficult that calculating the dynamics can blast the capacities of even modern super computers.

Under certain conditions, the quantum mechanical three-body problem may have a universal scaling solution and  physicists from Heidelberg University say they have experimentally confirmed such a model. The scientists under Prof. Dr. Matthias Weidemüller investigated three-particle molecules, known as trimers, under exotic conditions. 

Volcanic hazards aren't limited to eruptions, debris landslides can also cause a great deal of damage and loss of life. 

Stratovolcanoes, with their steep, conical shapes made up of lava and unconsolidated mixed materials, can reach a critical point of instability when they overgrow their flanks. This leads to partial collapse, and the product of this slope failure is a large-scale, rapid mass movement known as a catastrophic landslide or debris avalanche.