Think University of Nottingham students enjoy a pint on occasion?   It's a safe bet, since the school is putting in a fully-functioning brewery, and brewing must be a key contributor to the East Midlands economy since it boasts some 78 small or medium sized micro-breweries.  

Everyone is concerned about dwindling fossil fuel resources and current levels of petroleum consumption but pressure to shift to more sustainable energy sources has led to lobbyists and bigger government programs, not a better environment.

The best approach may be suited to regional conditions - some areas may use solar, some wind or geothermal, some nuclear.   There won't be a knockout technology that is a good fit  for everyone.  

What wind, solar, and geothermal power need to be useful to the masses is conversion into appropriate forms for distributing electricity. Electric power can already be distributed efficiently but conversion is necessary for use in automobiles and large-scale storage is problematic.

As antibiotic resistances continue evolve in a smaller world they become a more difficult problem to eradicate.

Acquisition of mutations is one of the ways by which bacteria become resistant to antibiotics. But this comes with a cost: although crucial for bacteria survival in a medium with antibiotics, in its absence bacteria growth rate is reduced. Although it is not possible to impaired bacteria to evolve and adapt to the environment, it is possible to choose the type of selective pressure (antibiotics) to administrate and, in this way, alter the course of evolution to our favor.

A new study shows the importance of knowing the costs of multi-resistance to find the best antibiotic combinations - the ones that carry more costs to the bacteria. 

Researchers who make generalizations about the effects of domestication and dog-wolf differences in the utilization of human visual signals, take note; a new study says dog breeds selected to work in visual contact with humans, such as sheep dogs and gun dogs, are better able to comprehend a pointing gesture than those breeds that usually work without direct supervision.

In a series of tests, Márta Gácsi from Eötvös University, Hungary worked with a team of researchers to examine the performance of different breeds of dogs in making sense of the human pointing gesture.

Men are adopting some modern attitudes but in some ways they are still the same.  According to a new study on the current thoughts and attitudes of men in the UK, 89% of men surveyed thought that any girl they date should have marriage potential and 38% thought anyone they date shouldn’t have had more than 5 former lovers.

How very Victorian.   No question addressed how many former lovers men should have.   Let's assume it's 5X, as nature intended.

68% would not punch their boss in the face, even if they could get away with it, but only 50% would punch a colleague if they had the same opportunity.  Which is positively civilized.

Pancakes make you happy.  Science knows that now.     For decades, social scientists have  been searching for a way to measure happiness without any success.

Surveys provide some useful information but people misreport and misremember their feelings when confronted by aguy with the clipboard. Ditto for studies where volunteers call in their feelings.  Generally speaking, people get squirrely when they know they're being studied.

But Peter Dodds and Chris Danforth, a mathematician and computer scientist working in the Advanced Computing Center at the University of Vermont, say they have created a remote-sensing mechanism that can record how millions of people around the world are feeling on any particular day — without their knowing it.