Not many people think about what it's like to be a bat, but for those who do, it's enlightening and potentially groundbreaking for understanding aspects of the human brain and nervous system.

Cynthia Moss, a member of the Neuroscience and Cognitive Science program at the University of Maryland, College Park, Md., is one of few researchers who spend time trying to get into the heads of bats.

Her new research suggests there is more to studying bats than figuring out how they process sound to distinguish environments.
"For decades it's been recognized that a bat's voice produces sounds that give the bat information about the location of objects," says Moss. "We're now recognizing that every time a bat produces a sound there are changes in brain activity that may be important for scene analysis, sensorimotor control and spatial memory and navigation."

Every year thousands of doctors and scientists fly to meetings all over the world, but with climate change accelerating, can this type of travel be justified, two doctors debate the issue in this week's BMJ.

Flying across continents in great numbers to exchange information will soon become as outdated and unsuitable to the modern world as the fax machine and the horse-drawn carriage, writes Professor Malcolm Green, from Imperial College, London.

Driving less and low energy light bulbs can contribute a little to reducing our carbon footprint, but if doctors stop going to international conferences they could make a real difference and be seen to be taking the lead, he argues.

If you remember the early days of computers, you saw some marketing claims that seemed to make sense but quickly evaporated when reality hit - you could store all your recipes, for example, until you realized computers were as loud as a turbo jet and used almost as much energy so it was not wise to keep them on - so keep a box with some index cards in it was much better.

You may feel the same way about adding an invisible layer of nanomaterials to the bottom of a metal put just so you can boil water using a lot less energy. While this increase in efficiency could some day have a big impact on cooling computer chips, and reducing costs for industrial boiling applications, like those early computers, it's best to wait a while before getting rid of the tea kettle.

Bringing water to a boil, and the related phase change that transforms the liquid into vapor, requires an interface between the water and air. In the example of a pot of water, two such interfaces exist: at the top where the water meets air, and at the bottom where the water meets tiny pockets of air trapped in the microscale texture and imperfections on the surface of the pot. Even though most of the water inside of the pot has reached 100 degrees Celsius and is at boiling temperature, it cannot boil because it is surrounded by other water molecules and there is no interface — i.e., no air — present to facilitate a phase change.

AMSTERDAM, June 26 /PRNewswire/ --

- 43 Elsevier Journals Receive Top Category Rank; Journal Citations Grow 10 Percent; Lancet and Cell Each Increase and Retain Leadership Positions

Elsevier, the leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, today announced highlights of its Journal Impact Factor performance in 2007. The 2007 Journal Citation Reports(c) published by ThomsonReuters, reports that 43 Elsevier journals ranked number one in their respective categories. In addition, total Elsevier journal citations grew by 10 percent (compared to an industry average of 8.9 percent).

Liver cancer is the third most common global cause of cancer death and a new study may be good news for drinkers and growers.

The large, prospective population-based study confirms an inverse relationship between coffee consumption and liver cancer risk. The study also found that higher levels of gamma-glutamyltransferase (GGT) in the blood were associated with an increased risk of developing the disease.

Researchers led by Gang Hu at the University of Helsinki set out to examine the associations between coffee consumption and serum GGT with the risk of liver cancer in a large prospective cohort. Residents of Finland drink more coffee per capita than the Japanese, Americans, Italians, and other Europeans, so Hu and colleagues studied 60,323 Finnish participants ages 25 to 74 who were cancer-free at baseline. The Finns were included in seven independent cross-sectional population surveys conducted between 1972 and 2002 and followed up through June 2006.

We read (and write here) a lot about gender issues in the scientific arena but usually topics are related to science education and promoting greater equality of numbers at the higher levels. There are a number of studies detailing the issues women face in a predominantly male science world but a University of Missouri religion professor has found that if the researcher is a male fieldworker studying women, the situation can be just as challenging.

His conclusions about male researchers studying female subjects are based on his extensive observations of the Diola (pronounced joe-la) people. Robert M. Baum, professor of religious studies in the College of Arts and Science has been traveling to southwestern Senegal on the African continent and conducting field research among the Diola communities, approximately 600,000 people, for more than 30 years. The modern Diola are primarily rice farmers.

Initially, Baum's work focused on pre-colonial Diola religious history during the era of the Atlantic slave trade, a period when there were male prophets. Later in his research, Baum studied the work and influence of Diola female prophets who began appearing after the French and Portuguese conquest of Diola lands in the late 1800s.