Can plasma be beautiful?   Surely, anything can, but physicists are luckier than most because when they probe the mysteries of plasma, the fourth state of matter, they often discover phenomena of striking beauty. 

Plasmas support a large variety of waves, some familiar to all such as light and sound waves, but a great many exist nowhere else and one of the fundamental waves in magnetized plasma is the shear Alfvén wave, named after Nobel Prize winning scientist Hannes Alfvén, who predicted their existence.

The big knock on huge wind or solar farms in developed countries is whose back yard the new power lines will run through.   Off-shore wind farms or solar farms in remote deserts may be a solution to that but current methods of transmission are unsuitable - at long distances, alternating current will have as much as 40% loss and while direct current will only lose about 7%, it means huge converter stations are essential before the power can reach homes.

High-voltage direct-current transmission (HVDCT) could be made more achievable using low-cost semiconductor cells, the focus of research at Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Systems and Device Technology IISB in Erlangen.

Voter turnout was huge in 2008 - some of that was due to advertising; since Sen. Obama did not limit adhere to campaign finance reform rules the way Sen. McCain did, Obama was able to raise and spend more money than Bush and Kerry did in 2004 combined, spending twice as much as his opponent.    But a large part of that was message also, and it led to 64% of eligible voters showing up, the highest turnout since the 1960s.

Know why vegetarians are so angry?  They don't eat meat, it seems.  So this Thanksgiving, grab the turkey leg and tear off a hunk of flesh with your teeth and rationalize that evolutionary psychology thinks it made your cavemen ancestors nicer people.

Our brain, wrinkles on our faces and even mountain chains have one thing in common - all those things, though very different, result from the same process, namely the compression of a 'rigid membrane'. 

Take a thin sheet of a solid material and try to compress it in such a way that it remains flat. You won't succeed, since the sheet bends systematically along its entire length. This is known as buckling. Now stick the same sheet onto a soft, thick substrate and compress it again in the same way: this time, it forms an extremely regular pattern of small wrinkles characterized by a particular distance between them, called the period.

Most chefs don't know how many calories are in the dishes they prepare.   7 percent were not at all familiar and 49 percent were only somewhat familiar.   Taste is what people pay for at $50 a sitting, not a nanny, yet restaurants could play an important role in helping to reduce the growing obesity epidemic by creating reduced-calorie meals, according to Penn State researchers.