Europe isn't in this Millennium on science but they are beginning to embrace the Internet. The availability and popularity of online education in Europe is on the rise. Following the revolutionary developments in online learning in the US, Europe is now catching up, increasing both funding and infrastructure. 

 In the last decade, the US has heavily invested in online education: it is projected that US online education will outgrow traditional education by 2015. Institutions like Stanford and MIT offer massive online courses for free, followed by up to 100,000 students worldwide. Europe now heads in the same direction. Within its upcoming 'Erasmus For All' program the European Commission makes more funding available to support distance education in Europe. 

Oh, for those days of 2007, when the miracle vegetable story of the week - maybe the year - was instead about the super powers of chocolate.

The science underpinning those claims was sparse but the usually-reputable AAAS even had an entire panel on it at its annual meeting, populated by only one researcher who was not funded by the Mars chocolate empire.

The more conservative a female House of Representatives lawmaker is, the more likely she is to look like a woman, according to a UCLA analysis.

Heteronormative gender bias, right? Stupid GOP likes 1950s stereotypes.

Maybe. The GOP wears ties too, and it's hard to know if President Obama even owns one. The UCLA psychologists were somewhat sure they could tell a book by its cover, and so they did.  They also found the opposite to be true: Female politicians with less feminine facial features were more likely to be Democrats, and the more liberal their voting record, the more mannish they looked.

Children's television is 'problematic', according to a new paper in the Journal of Communication.

While there is no physical bullying in these shows, what the authors consider an 'alarming' amount contain behaviors like cruel gossiping and manipulation of friendship.  There aren't many ways for shows to be funny in 2012, it seems.

What to give the person who has everything? A clock that will keep perfect time  even after the heat-death of the universe. 

Such a "space-time crystal" has periodic structure in time as well as space. Why haven't we built those? With such a 4D crystal, scientists would have a new and more effective means by which to study how complex physical properties and behaviors emerge from the collective interactions of large numbers of individual particles, the so-called many-body problem of physics. A space-time crystal could also be used to study phenomena in the quantum world, such as entanglement, in which an action on one particle impacts another particle even if the two particles are separated by vast distances.

The muscle-building dietary supplement creatine helps women battling depressions, according to a study from South Korea and the University of Utah. It reports that women with major depressive disorder (MDD) who augmented their daily antidepressant with 5 grams of creatine responded twice as fast and experienced remission of the illness at twice the rate of women who took the antidepressant alone.