A new paper gives psycholgists a unique glimpse at how humans develop an ability to use tools in childhood while nonhuman primates--such as capuchin monkeys and chimpanzees--remain only occasional tool users.

Dorothy Fragaszy, a psychology professor at the University of Georgia, created two studies to look at how non-human primates and human children differ in completing simple spatial reasoning tasks. 

Much like a game of Operation, human children ages 2, 3 and 4 and adult nonhuman primates were asked to fit a stick, a cross and a tomahawk into a matching cutout space on a tray. Children were also given an opportunity to complete this task by placing the sticks on a mat with a drawing of the matching shape, as well as into a space on a tray.

Renewable energy is not very sustainable in the European Union (EU) yet but the food industry, which is heavily reliable on subsidies to stay competitive with the rest of the world, needs renewable energy costs to come down to remain viable.

Until then, the food sector is going to resist using renewable energy, which is a scant 7 percent of their usage, compared to 15 percent in the EU overall. Instead of advocating basic research to improve renewable energy, the call is out to lower meat consumption in a new report. And of course to reduce food choices by shopping locally and seasonally.

Osteoporosis, a disease of progressive bone loss, affects 70 percent of the U.S. population older than age 50 - about 50 percent of women and 20 percent of men. These individuals are at risk for fragility fractures, a break that results from a fall, or occurs in the absence of obvious trauma, and most commonly seen in the wrist, the upper arm, the hip, and the spine.  

People who sustain a fragility fracture are at a higher risk for future fractures and face increasing treatment costs. According to a new study, anti-osteoporotic therapy, a treatment intended to increase bone mineral density and slow or stop the loss of bone tissue, can decrease the risk of subsequent fractures by 40 percent.  

A course on critical thinking has generated a new proposal to remove sources of bias in research and improve confidence in published studies.

Social science research got a black eye recently when the authors of several studies were shown to have manipulated data. But the more prevalent issue in the social sciences today is not actual fraud, but subtle and usually inadvertent bias that skews the conclusions of studies and often makes them unrepeatable.

Pioneering new research sheds light on the impact of climate change on subglacial lakes found under the Greenland ice sheet.

A team of experts, led by Dr Steven Palmer from the University of Exeter, has studied the water flow paths from one such subglacial lake, which drained beneath the ice sheet in 2011.

The study shows, for the first time, how water drained from the lake - via a subglacial tunnel. Significantly, the authors present satellite observations that show that a similar event happened in 1995, suggesting that this lake fills and drains periodically.

The study, called Subglacial lake drainage detected beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet is published in the journal Nature Communications.

Though activists want to retreat into the past and have less energy available for the public (which will impact the poor) a more progressive approach is to look to science and the future - but that will only work if there are stable policies in place.

Oddly, this progressive thinking is coming from energy corporations rather than environmentalists. A group of electricity corporations are creating a picture of a future high-tech energy mix that would help nations meet climate-related CO₂ reduction pledges and the expanding demand for electricity.