Banner
Object-Based Processing: Numbers Confuse How We Perceive Spaces

Researchers recently studied the relationship between numerical information in our vision, and...

Males Are Genetically Wired To Beg Females For Food

Bees have the reputation of being incredibly organized and spending their days making sure our...

The Scorched Cherry Twig And Other Christmas Miracles Get A Science Look

Bleeding hosts and stigmatizations are the best-known medieval miracles but less known ones, like ...

$0.50 Pantoprazole For Stomach Bleeding In ICU Patients Could Save Families Thousands Of Dollars

The inexpensive medication pantoprazole prevents potentially serious stomach bleeding in critically...

User picture.
News StaffRSS Feed of this column.

News Releases From All Over The World, Right To You... Read More »

Blogroll

Aaron Hernandez, until today a young, rich ($40 million contract) tight end for the New England Patriots football team, has been arrested and charged with the murder of Odin Lloyd, who had been dating his fiancée’s sister.

The key piece of evidence: Bubblicious bubble gum. Prosecutors say they can prove Hendandez purchased gum at a gas station hours before the murder and that they believe a chewed piece of gum found at a crime scene will have DNA from Hernandez, which would place him in the vehicle involved and thus as the murderer.

Researchers in the U.S., Europe and Japan have produced the first comparison of both the DNA sequences and which genes are active, or being transcribed, between the domestic tomato and its wild cousins.

The results give insight into the genetic changes involved in domestication and may help with future efforts to breed new traits into tomato or other crops, said Julin Maloof, professor of plant biology in the College of Biological Sciences at the University of California, Davis and senior author of the study in PNAS.

If you can scorch a baseball over the mound, you can thank extinct ancestors.

That's not to say that, despite what an evolutionary psychologist might contend, our ability to throw fast and accurately evolved so our ancestors could play ball better and therefore get more dates.

Instead, this ability first evolved nearly 2 million years ago -  humans are unique in our throwing ability - to aid in hunting


Claims from Chen-Yu Zhang's group at China's Nanjing University made international headlines when they reported that, after mice ate lettuce, bits of genetic material from the plants made its way into their bloodstreams intact - and could turn the animals' own genes off.

Miracle vegetable of the week journalists said it was a triumph for the promise of medicinal food. Scare journalism of the week writers instead worried that genetically modified food might modify consumers in unanticipated ways.

Look for actual science to receive far less attention.

A computer analysis of nearly 2 million Tweets on the Twitter online social network revealed another divide in the religious culture war - while atheists engage in more analytical thinking, Christians use more positive words and fewer negative words.

To identify Christian and atheist Twitter users, the researchers studied the tweets of more than 16,000 followers of a few prominent Christian and atheist personalities on Twitter. They analyzed the tweets for their emotional content (the use of more positive or negative words), the frequency of words (such as "friend" and "brother") that are related to social processes, and the frequency of their use of words (such as "because" and "think") that are associated with an analytical thinking style.

Despite, the hype, and though the Apple iPad® is being used for intraoperative procedure guidance, percutaneous procedure planning and mobile interpretation of some imaging examinations - rather limited benefit - the majority of radiology residents are using it instead as a really expensive way to read journals, according to a paper in the Journal of the American College of Radiology.

A total of 38 radiology residents in the radiology program at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston were provided with iPad 2 tablets and subscriptions to e-Anatomy and STATdx. After six months of device use, residents were surveyed to assess their opinions regarding the technology as a tool for education and clinical practice.