At the 2012 Democratic convention, when President Obama mentioned that his administration had killed the terrorist Osama Bin Laden, the building erupted in cheers.

This was positively un-Democratic, to both Democrats and Republicans. Democrats were supposed to be more tolerant of other cultures, with safe spaces for all, and anything that looked like being critical of Muslims was usually frowned upon.

COLUMBUS, Ohio - While events like the Arab Spring brought hope that the internet could inspire the growth of democracy in authoritarian countries, a new study offers a reality check.

Researchers studying Russian and Ukrainian internet users found that their demand for democratic reforms in their countries depended on what they were doing when they connected to the web.

Those who were on the internet primarily to get news and share political opinions with others were most likely to demand more democracy in their countries.

Those who visited the web mostly for entertainment purposes - such as watching cat videos - were less likely to say they wanted more democracy in their countries and believed they had more democracy than they actually did.

Our visual system is constantly bombarded with complex optical information. The input information is often insufficient or ambiguous, leading to potentially conflicting interpretations about the structure of the physical world. The human brain has amazing computational powers to resolve these ambiguities and generate a coherent perception almost instantly. As a way to understand how our brain works, scientists have been fascinated about how the human brain achieves this goal.

DNA tests have confirmed that one of the three southern rockhopper penguin chicks born at Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan between June 4 and 6 was conceived through artificial insemination. This is the result of a project led by Kaiyukan with the collaboration of Associate Professor KUSUNOKI Hiroshi (Kobe University Graduate School of Agricultural Science). It is the world's first successful case of a southern rockhopper penguin being conceived through artificial insemination.

Southern rockhopper penguins are a species of birds approximately 50cm in height which inhabit southern islands near Antarctica such as the Falkland Islands. They are on the red list of the International Union for Conservation of Nature as a threatened species.

The media often imply that the goal of the hunt for extrasolar planets is to find a rocky planet about the size of Earth orbiting a star like the sun at a distance that would allow liquid water to persist on its surface. In other words, the goal is to find Earth 2.0.

But there are reasons to be interested in the other worlds even if they couldn't possibly harbor life. The hot, rocky planets, for example, offer rare and precious clues to the character and evolution of the early Earth.

The Kepler satellite has detected more than 100 hot, rocky planets orbiting close to their stars. If these planets formed from interstellar clouds with Earth-like abundances of volatile elements, like hydrogen, water and carbon dioxide, these planets might have steam atmospheres.

Plasmodium vivax (P. vivax) parasites, which cause a debilitating form of malaria, are yielding their secrets to an international team of researchers funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health. In the largest such effort to date, the team determined complete genomes of nearly 200 P. vivax strains that recently infected people in eight countries. Comparative analysis showed the parasites clustered into four genetically distinct populations that provide insights into the movement of P. vivax over time and suggest how it is still adapting to regional variations in both the mosquitoes that transmit it and the humans it infects.