Apple's Siri sounds like she cares about your needs, but she is faking it.  But some research by a team of engineers shown at the IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technology describes a new computer program that gauges human feelings through speech with substantially greater accuracy than existing approaches. 

Some day you may have a smart phone that identifies your mood.

Arthrobotrys oligospora doesn't live a charmed life; it survives on a diet of roundworm, which isn't all that appealing, but the discovery of a team led by Mingjun Zhang, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, could give the fungus's life more purpose—as a cancer fighter. 

They discovered that nanoparticles produced by A. oligospora hold promise for stimulating the immune system and killing tumors. 

Plants grow upward from a tip of undifferentiated tissue called the shoot apical meristem. As the tip extends, stem cells at the center of the meristem divide and increase in numbers and the cells on the periphery differentiate to form plant organs, such as leaves and flowers. In between these two layers, a group of boundary cells go into a quiescent state and form a barrier that not only separates stem cells from differentiating cells, but eventually forms the borders that separate the plant's organs. 

Probiotics are the miracle product of the decade because of the belief they can help cultivate “intestinal flora”, whatever that is supposed to mean.  It's a $32 billion industry by 2014 but there is one species that scientists can confirm have a benefit - zebrafish.

The Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology found that feeding probiotics to baby zebrafish accelerated their development and increased their chances of survival into adulthood.

We can read words and phrases and even solve multi-step mathematical problems without conscious awareness, say a team of psychologists at the Hebrew University.

They conducted experiments which they say constitutes a challenge to existing ideas of unconscious processes; namely that reading and solving math problems, complex, rule-based operations, require consciousness. 

Two NASA satellites,  Terra and the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) , gathered data as a Super Typhoon passed over Bopha on Dec. 2nd, gathering valuable data for forecasters. Since then, Bopha's maximum sustained winds fluctuated up and down from its previous high of 155 mph and today, Dec. 3rd, the storm reached its strongest point - a Category 5 typhoon on the Saffir-Simpson scale, with sustained winds of 161 mph. Warnings are up for the Philippines as Bopha approaches.

Terra captured a visible image of Bopha showing the extent of the storm and revealing the eye of the storm while TRMM captured rainfall rates, identified areas of heavy rainfall, and measured cloud heights.