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Here's Where Your Backyard Was 300 Million Years Ago

We may use terms like "grounded" and terra firma to mean stability and consistency but geology...

Convergent Evolution Cheat Sheet Now 120 Million Years Old

One tenet of natural selection is a random walk of genes but nature may be more predictable than...

Synchrotron Could Shed Light On Exotic Dark Photons

There are many hypothetical particles proposed to explain dark matter and one idea to explore how...

The Pain Scale Is Broken But This May Fix It

Chronic pain is reported by over 20 percent of the global population but there is no scientific...

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Countries are looking for fossil fuel alternatives that can get somewhere near the density of gasoline but with less impact on the global ecosystem. Among the most promising contenders for mainstream alternative energy production, especially on alternative science media sites like Science 2.0, is hydrogen – but that increasingly appears to be an unlikely candidate.

Low energy conversion efficiency weakens the case for hydrogen as a commercial fuel. Hydrogen requires one-too-many conversions to be as efficient as electricity (water to hydrogen to electricity), as opposed to a simple fuel to electricity conversion.

20 years ago there was widespread concern about the impact of video game violence. "Mortal Kombat" created a gore filter so parents could turn that off, "Postal" had, unsurprisingly, someone committing mass killings emulating the rash of government union workers shooting people, which gave birth to the 'going postal' idiom. "Night Trap" was banned due to its use of full-motion video related to the murders.

Recent mass killings in Norway, America and in numerous countries have happened at locations as different as schools, movie theaters, and marathons. Though the actual number of mass killings has not changed in 30 years, they get a lot more attention now.

One trait they all share in common is psychiatric medication but unsurprisingly the biggest focus in a roundtable discussion among film studies scholars, psychiatrists and psychologists in a publication named Violence and Gender
is that they were all young males. The participants speculate about the possible reasons for high incidence of these crimes and the motives of the young male perpetrators.

There is a great deal of interest how cocoa flavanols (a type of antioxidant ) like monomers and procyanidins might prevent obesity and type-2 diabetes, though little is actually known how they might work. 

A new study compared the impacts of long-term dietary exposure to cocoa flavanol monomers, oligomers and polymers on the effects of high-fat feeding. Mice were fed a high-fat diet supplemented with either a cocoa flavanol extract or a flavanol fraction enriched with monomeric, oligomeric, or polymeric procyanidins for 12 weeks. 

The International Peanut Genome Initiative, a multinational group crop geneticists who have been working in tandem for the last several years, have successfully sequenced the genome of 
Arachis hypogaea
 - the peanut. 

Arachis hypogaea and also called groundnut and, of course, peanut, is important both commercially and nutritionally. While the oil- and protein-rich legume is seen as a cash crop in the developed world, it remains a valuable sustenance crop in developing nations. The new peanut genome sequence is available to researchers and plant breeders across the globe to aid in the breeding of more productive and more resilient peanut varieties. 

The inscription on a 3,500-year-old stone may be one of the world's oldest weather reports - and it could cause us to revise our chronology of the ancient Middle East.