Chestnut Hill, MA (April 5, 2014) – A survey of science teachers finds they support a new approach to science education, but they struggle to believe that all students are capable of exploring science using a method called argumentation, according to researchers from the Lynch School of Education at Boston College.

Furthermore, teachers in low-income schools said the pressure to meet testing requirements curbs the use of argumentation in their lessons, according to the findings, which were presented today at the American Educational Research Association annual meeting in Philadelphia.

Sorry Batman, the dark knight persona is going exactly where Frank Miller predicted it would three decades ago in "The Dark Knight Returns" - you are going to be labeled an over-medicated, mentally disturbed sociopath.

The over-medicated may be right. The recent shooting at Fort Hood in Texas was in a "gun-free" zone but a soldier who had never been in combat was still on prescription medication for psychiatric issues related to combat zone trauma. As long as psychiatry remains trapped in the symptom-based world of the past, it is going to be the case that someone who complains enough will get a prescription.

Researchers have have found that the repeated application of manure contaminated with antibiotics changes the composition of bacteria in the soil.

The focus of the investigation was on sulfadiazine (SDZ), a widely used antibiotic in animal husbandry which enters the soil via manure. The researchers report that repeated application of the antibiotic leads to a decrease in beneficial soil bacteria and at the same time an increase in bacteria that are harmful to humans.

Two things send our Uncanny Valley creepiness meter straight to red - realistic robots that flirt and anything that laughs. 

Realistic laughing is actually not trivial. We see it in real life, we can often tell when someone is fake laughing. On computers it is even more off-putting. Scholars at the Numediart Institute of the University of Mons are members of a project called ILHAIRE - The Science Of Laughter, which seeks a better understanding of laughter features in order to incorporate them into interactive systems. 

Some long non-coding RNAs can give rise to small proteins that have biological functions, according to a recent study that describes how researchers have used ribosome profiling to identify several hundred long non-coding RNAs that may give rise to small peptides.

A new study of gamma-ray light may lead to evidence of dark matter, a hypothetical blanket term for whatever must make up most of the material universe.

Using publicly available data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, scholars at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Chicago have created new maps and they believe their maps show that the galactic center produces more high-energy gamma rays than can be explained by known sources.

They believe this excess emission is consistent with some forms of dark matter.