When white Americans were asked in a new study to pick a dollar amount they would have to be paid to live the rest of their lives as a black person, most requested less than $10,000. A minor thing.

In contrast, study participants said they would have to be paid about $1 million to give up television for the rest of their lives.

This would seem to state that white people don't think being black is such a big deal in 2007. Not the case at all, says Philip Mazzocco, co-author of a new study study and assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State University's Mansfield campus. Instead, he says the results suggest most white Americans don't truly comprehend the persisting racial disparities in our country.

ScientificBlogging.com Featured Columnist Jane Poynter has written a book, The Human Experiment: Two Years and Twenty Minutes Inside Biosphere 2 , discussing her experiences inside the legendary long-term science experiment.

Why do some online communities succeed, like Second Life, Facebook and, well, this one, and some fail?

The answer may be in what their communities think about 'giving' and it can tell us a lot about people in general.

Everyone does something on social sites for a reason. People like to 'get paid' even if that doesn't mean money. It is why people submit articles to Digg - submitters get the satisfaction of knowing they brought an interesting article to people that they may not have found themselves.

Human embryonic stem cells (hESC), new cells that are basically a biological blank slate, become more specialized as they develop and contribute to a number of organs and tissues. As such, they have the potential to treat diseases such as Parkinson’s but their progress has been slowed because of the ongoing ethical debate over how human embryonic stem cells are derived.

Some European countries - Austria, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Poland, Slovakia and Switzerland - forbid the creation of new hESC lines surplus embryos, even ones that remain from infertility procedures. In June, 2006 the EU parliament only narrowly agreed to fund stem-cell research, and then only as long as it excluded activities that involve destroying human embryos. In the US the restrictions are similar.