With all the hype surrounding the Large Hadron Collider, it's easy to forget that there are lots of other puzzles in physics still being tackled every day.

The Kondo effect, one of the few examples in physics where many particles collectively behave as one object (a single quantum-mechanical body), has intrigued scientists around the world for decades.

When a single magnetic atom is located inside a metal, the free electrons of the metal 'screen' the atom. That way, a cloud of many electrons around the atom becomes magnetized. Sometimes, if the metal is cooled down to very low temperatures, the atomic spin enters a so-called 'quantum superposition' state. In this state its north-pole points in two opposite directions at the same time. As a result, the entire electron cloud around the spin will also be simultaneously magnetized in two directions.

Have a Facebook account? Laura Buffardi, doctoral student in psychology, and associate professor W. Keith Campbell from the University of Georgia says it may tell them you are a narcissist.

Narcissism is not just attention-seeking or wanting to be liked. Clearly everyone who signs up for a social media site wants to interact with others. It is more severe and characterized by an inability to form healthy, long-term relationships.

The tremendous growth of social networking sites (Facebook now has 100 million users, for example) has led psychologists to explore how personality traits are expressed online. Buffardi and Campbell chose Facebook because it's the most popular networking site among college students and because it has a fixed format that makes it easier for researchers to compare user pages.

Timothy Judge, PhD, and Beth Livingston from the University of Florida say that sexism still exists and it has positive effects on income ... if you're a man. Their study says men who believe in what they call traditional roles for women (whether they believed a woman's place is in the home, whether employing wives leads to more juvenile delinquency, whether a man should be the primary earner and if the woman should take care of the home and family) earn more money than men who don't, though women with more traditional outlooks don't make much(edited) more than women with more egalitarian views.

Is your life worth more than $130,000? In Holland, it isn't. The Council for Public Health and Healthcare (RVZ) recently advised that only those treatments which cost less than €80,000 to keep a patient alive in good health for a year longer should be eligible for reimbursement.

But the use of an explicit 'value' for lifesaving health care is a controversial discussion in the Netherlands, just like it would be anywhere, and that's wrong, according to health economist professor Han Bleichrodt.

Global corporations view climate change as a driver of risk and opportunity but they'd like to know what works, what doesn't work and what the regulations will be before they make strategic investment decisions, according to this year's findings from the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), which includes exclusive data from 1550 of the world's major companies on greenhouse gas emissions and climate change related strategies.

Senior managers are calling for greater visibility on climate change related policy in order to better anticipate the impact of regulation driven carbon markets and carbon prices.

Despite the uncertainty with regard to regulation the majority of global companies are acting to reduce their emissions. 74% are now reporting emissions reduction targets, showing companies are increasingly taking climate change seriously.

Scientists in Spain are reporting an advance toward a new method for determining the purity of heroin that could save lives by allowing investigators to quickly identify impure and more toxic forms of the drug being sold on the street. Unlike conventional tests, it does not destroy the original drug sample, according to their report.

In the new study, Salvador Garrigues and colleagues point out that the purity of heroin can vary widely, since pushers often mix it with chalk, flour, or other "cutting agents." Because heroin users do not know the exact purity of the drug, they are more at risk for overdose and even death. Conventional tests for determining the purity of street heroin involve destructive and time-consuming sample preparation, the scientists say.