If you want to solve big network security problems, sometimes it pays to think small - as in ants.

A concept called 'swarm intelligence' adapts quickly to changing threats and it uses 'digital ants' to wander through computer networks looking for those threats, such as computer 'worms', those  self-replicating programs designed to steal information or facilitate unauthorized use of machines. When a digital ant detects a threat, it doesn't take long for an entire army of ants to converge at that location, which also draws the attention of human operators who step in to investigate.

You may feel like you're not in the same league as Albert Einstein or Charles Darwin (note: statistically, you are not)  but you probably share one thing if you are reading this article; patterns of correspondence.

A new Northwestern University study of human behavior says that people who wrote letters in olden days using pen and paper did so in a pattern similar to the way people use e-mail today.  The study in Science seeks to find the similarity of these two seemingly different activities, with the underlying pattern of human activity linking letters and e-mails.

The moon has no has no atmosphere like Earth's but oxygen which can be used for people, growing food, creating water and even burning rocket fuel is trapped in its soil.

Antioxidants are a big buzzword these days - everyone claims to have them and that impresses buyers but most don't really know what that means.

Health conscious people know that taking antioxidants to reduce the levels of reactive oxygen species (ROS) - ions or very small molecules that include free radicals - in blood can prevent the DNA damage done by free radicals, which are the result of oxidative stress.  What fewer people know is that excessive use of antioxidants depletes their immune systems.

Patterns of brain activity allow researchers to know what number a person has just seen or how many dots a person has been presented with, according to a report published in Current Biology.

The findings confirm the notion that numbers are encoded in the brain via detailed and specific activity patterns and open the door to more sophisticated exploration of humans' high-level numerical abilities. Although "number-tuned" neurons have been found in monkeys, scientists hadn't managed to get any farther than particular brain regions before now in humans.

If you learn a foreign language when you are young but the exposure to that language is brief and you don't get to hear or practice it subsequently, does the neglected language fade away from our memory?

Yes, forgetting is forgetting, has been the belief ... you 'use it or lose it' ... but language learning may instead be more like 'riding a bike' and even a "forgotten" language may be more deeply engraved in our minds than we realize.