When Ohio State glaciologists failed to find the expected radioactive signals in the latest core they drilled from a Himalayan ice field, they knew it meant trouble for their research.   Those missing markers of radiation, remnants from atomic bomb tests a half-century ago, could mean a much greater threat to the half-billion or more people living downstream of that vast mountain range.

It may mean that future water supplies could fall far short of what's needed to keep that population alive.

People are different, both physically and mentally, but genetically everyone is very similar, scientists have said for decades. But with population research becoming more and more common, the University of Alberta's Tim Caulfield is concerned that genetic research could awaken racist attitudes.

Just last year Nobel Prize winning geneticist James Watson claimed there are genes responsible for creating differences in human intelligence. These comments made international headlines, Watson was vilified and he later apologized.

Not much money this year?   Concerned that GM and Ford and all the big banks won't give out huge bonuses to CEOs if you spend too much?   Jan Brakefield, assistant professor of consumer sciences, offers a psychological tip sheet to follow during the holiday shopping season.

*Make a spending plan and stick to it.

*Shop early, before Thanksgiving. Eliminates last minute panic buying.

*Be prepared each time you leave home to shop. Carry a list of who you are buying for and how much you can spend. Be specific. Get agreements from family members.

*Pay cash. Credit card users typically spend twice as much money as others.

What is the latest recipe for anti-matter?  Take a gold sample the size of the head of a push pin, shoot a laser through it, and suddenly more than 100 billion particles of anti-matter appear.  The anti-matter, also known as positrons, shoots out of the target in a cone-shaped plasma "jet."

This new ability to create a large number of positrons in a small laboratory opens the door to several fresh avenues of anti-matter research, including an understanding of the physics underlying various astrophysical phenomena such as black holes and gamma ray bursts.  Anti-matter research also could reveal why more matter than anti-matter survived the Big Bang at the start of the universe.

Researchers dated remains from four multiple burials discovered in Germany in 2005 and found that the 4,600-year-old graves contained groups of adults and children buried facing each other – an unusual practice in Neolithic culture.  One of the graves was found to contain a female, a male and two children. Using DNA analysis, the researchers established that the group consisted of a mother, father and their two sons aged 8-9 and 4-5 years: the oldest molecular genetic evidence of a nuclear family in the world (so far).

The burials, discovered and excavated at Eulau, Saxony-Anhalt, were also unusual for the great care taken in the treatment of the dead. The remains of thirteen individuals were found in total, all of whom had been interned simultaneously.

150 years ago it was discovered that the speech center is in the left cortex  and since then functional differences between left and right hemisphere have become well known; language is mainly handled by the left hemisphere while spatial recognition is more specialized to the right hemisphere.

However, the structural differences of synapses underlying left-right difference of the brain have remained unknown. Now a research team led by Prof Ryuichi Shigemoto at the National Institute for Physiological Sciences in Japan, and colleagues have found that synaptic size and shape in the center of the spatial memory (i.e. hippocampus) were asymmetrical between synapses receiving input from the left and right hemisphere.