http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=science-reveals-wh...
Science Reveals Why Calorie Counts Are All Wrong [Preview]

Digestion is far too messy a process to accurately convey in neat numbers. The counts on food labels can differ wildly from the calories you actually extract, for many reasons
At one particularly strange moment in my career, I found myself picking through giant conical piles of dung produced by emus—those goofy Australian kin to the ostrich. I was trying to figure out how often seeds pass all the way through the emu digestive system intact enough to germinate. My colleagues and I planted thousands of collected seeds and waited. Eventually, little jungles grew.

Clearly, the plants that emus eat have evolved seeds that can survive digestion relatively unscathed. Whereas the birds want to get as many calories from fruits as possible—including from the seeds—the plants are invested in protecting their progeny. Although it did not occur to me at the time, I later realized that humans, too, engage in a kind of tug-of-war with the food we eat, a battle in which we are measuring the spoils—calories—all wrong.

Almost every packaged food today features calorie counts in its label. Most of these counts are inaccurate because they are based on a system of averages that ignores the complexity of digestion.
Recent research reveals that how many calories we extract from food depends on which species we eat, how we prepare our food, which bacteria are in our gut and how much energy we use to digest different foods.
Current calorie counts do not consider any of these factors. Digestion is so intricate that even if we try to improve calorie counts, we will likely never make them perfectly accurate.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/image-of-the-week/2013/08/21/no...
No more right-brain/left-brain!

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/352613/description/Bacte...
Bacteria can cause pain on their own
Microbes caused discomfort in mice by activating nervous system, not immune response

http://www.indiaeducationdiary.in/showEE.asp?newsid=25015
Bhartiya City presents Edinburgh International Science Festival in Bengaluru
Building on the overwhelming success of its other cultural activities where Bhartiya City had played host to Slayer, Santana and Guns ‘n Roses, it will now present the 26th Edinburgh International Science Festival - the most exciting science festival in the world in Bengaluru.

The 10 day long festival starting from August 30 will be a splendid affair to make Science fun, exciting and engaging for young minds. The Science Festival is a strategic initiative by Bhartiya City, committed to curating exceptional cultural programs to engage and inspire the country’s youth and promoting culture, science and technology. This was announced today by Mr Snehdeep Aggarwal, Chairman of Bhartiya Group, Dr Simon Gage, Director and CEO of EISF and Mr Ian Felton, Deputy High Commissioner of Britain to India in a press conference in Bengaluru.

The Festival expects around 50,000 visitors that include school children and their parents. The event is organized by Bhartiya City and co-presented by Discovery Kids, Powered by Horlicks Promind and in association with British Council, Art Konnect and mycity4kids.com

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=just-thinking-abou...
Just Thinking about Science Triggers Moral Behavior

Psychologists find deep connection between scientific method and morality

http://www.asianscientist.com/health-medicine/shorter-working-hours...
Shorter Working Hours Do Not Guarantee Happier Workers
A reduction in working hours does not necessarily mean happier employees, according to a study of Korean workers

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone....
Are All Placebo Effects Equal? Placebo Pills, Sham Acupuncture, Cue Conditioning and Their Association

Jian Kong mail, Rosa Spaeth, Amanda Cook, Irving Kirsch, Brian Claggett, Mark Vangel, Randy L. Gollub, Jordan W. Smoller, Ted J. Kaptchuk
Abstract

Placebo treatments and healing rituals have been used to treat pain throughout history. The present within-subject crossover study examines the variability in individual responses to placebo treatment with verbal suggestion and visual cue conditioning by investigating whether responses to different types of placebo treatment, as well as conditioning responses, correlate with one another. Secondarily, this study also examines whether responses to sham acupuncture correlate with responses to genuine acupuncture. Healthy subjects were recruited to participate in two sequential experiments. Experiment one is a five-session crossover study. In each session, subjects received one of four treatments: placebo pills (described as Tylenol), sham acupuncture, genuine acupuncture, or no treatment rest control condition. Before and after each treatment, paired with a verbal suggestion of positive effect, each subject's pain threshold, pain tolerance, and pain ratings to calibrated heat pain were measured. At least 14 days after completing experiment one, all subjects were invited to participate in experiment two, during which their analgesic responses to conditioned visual cues were tested. Forty-eight healthy subjects completed experiment one, and 45 completed experiment two. The results showed significantly different effects of genuine acupuncture, placebo pill and rest control on pain threshold. There was no significant association between placebo pills, sham acupuncture and cue conditioning effects, indicating that individuals may respond to unique healing rituals in different ways. This outcome suggests that placebo response may be a complex behavioral phenomenon that has properties that comprise a state, rather than a trait characteristic. This could explain the difficulty of detecting a signature for “placebo responders.” However, a significant association was found between the genuine and sham acupuncture treatments, implying that the non-specific effects of acupuncture may contribute to the analgesic effect observed in genuine acupuncture analgesia.

http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/science-or-just-c...
Science or just common sense?

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/352830/description/Tiny_...
Tiny human almost-brains made in lab
Stem cells arrange themselves into a version of the most complex human organ
Largely left to their own devices, human stem cells knitted themselves into tissue with a multitude of brain structures and specialized cadres of neurons in a form reminiscent of the brain of a nine-week-old fetus, scientists report August 28 in Nature.

The tissue doesn’t approach the dizzying complexity of the human brain. Yet these tiny neural balls, each no bigger than a BB pellet, represent the most complex brain structure grown in a lab to date, researchers say. The new work could provide an unprecedented window into the early stages of human brain development, a simple way to test pharmaceuticals on human brain tissue and a way to study the brain defects of individual patients, the study authors suggest.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/352799/description/News_...
News in Brief: Flu antibodies can make disease worse
Pigs vaccinated against one influenza virus got lung damage if infected with another strain
Some antibodies to flu viruses may actually make patients sicker, a new study of pigs suggests.

The finding, published August 28 in Science Translational Medicine, may point to problems with catchall influenza vaccines.

Pigs vaccinated against a seasonal strain of influenza made antibodies to that strain. Some of the antibodies could also latch on to a different flu virus that caused a pandemic among humans in 2009, report scientists led by Hana Golding of the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research in Bethesda, Md., and Amy Vincent of the Department of Agriculture’s National Animal Disease Center in Ames, Iowa.

Instead of protecting the pigs against the 2009 pandemic flu, the broad-range antibodies actually helped the virus invade lung cells, causing pneumonia and lung damage.

Scientists hoping to create a universal flu vaccine need to learn how the pigs’ antibodies and viruses interacted to make the disease worse, James Crowe Jr. of Vanderbilt University writes in a commentary in the same issue of the journal.

And vaccines aren't the only problem, Crowe says. Natural infections may provoke similar disease-worsening problems.

http://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/solving-the-mysteries-of-hiatus-in-glo...
Solving the Mysteries of Hiatus in Global Warming
Is the Pacific Ocean Responsible for a Pause in Global Warming?
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=pacific-ocean-and-...
Sea-surface temperatures may explain why climate change is not warming the planet as fast
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/327/5970/1219.short
Plus, a decline in stratospheric water vapor over the last decade or so can explain 25% of the stall in global temperature rise:

"Stratospheric water vapor concentrations decreased by about 10% after the year 2000. Here we show that this acted to slow the rate of increase in global surface temperature over 2000–2009 by about 25% compared to that which would have occurred due only to carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. More limited data suggest that stratospheric water vapor probably increased between 1980 and 2000, which would have enhanced the decadal rate of surface warming during the 1990s by about 30% as compared to estimates neglecting this change. These findings show that stratospheric water vapor is an important driver of decadal global surface climate change."

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunction/2013/0...
Turning the tables on obesity and BMI: When more can be better.

while obese and unhealthy people suffer from the highest mortality, people with normal BMI can also be quite unhealthy and be near the upper or mid range of the mortality scale. Conversely, an obese person can be metabolically healthy. So why is this? The short answer is that for high-BMI individuals, the right fat in the right location might provide some benefits, like soaking up toxins or being a source of energy. In case of people with normal BMI it gets even more interesting; they often suffer from a poor nutritional and metabolic status in spite of their favorable BMI profile, and this can lead to worse mortality and health.

To me, the practice of boiling down something as complicated as health or mortality to a single number like the BMI says a lot about the human desire to simplify and to use what’s readily available rather than what’s important. The belief again reminds you of the drunkard and his keys; BMI is readily measurable and it’s what we know, so why not use it? The truth is of course more convoluted. True metrics of mortality will have to take into account not just variables like fat distribution but – as the graphic illustrates – other biochemical and physiological indicators like insulin sensitivity and inflammation. It’s very much a holistic approach, something that medicine is increasingly appreciating in both diagnosis and treatment

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/352859/description/Pover...
Poverty may tax thinking abilities
But sudden windfalls improve poor people's mental fortunes

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v500/n7464/full/nature12506.html Richness of human gut microbiome correlates with metabolic markers We are facing a global metabolic health crisis provoked by an obesity epidemic. Here we report the human gut microbial composition in a population sample of 123 non-obese and 169 obese Danish individuals. We find two groups of individuals that differ by the number of gut microbial genes and thus gut bacterial richness. They contain known and previously unknown bacterial species at different proportions; individuals with a low bacterial richness (23% of the population) are characterized by more marked overall adiposity, insulin resistance and dyslipidaemia and a more pronounced inflammatory phenotype when compared with high bacterial richness individuals. The obese individuals among the lower bacterial richness group also gain more weight over time. Only a few bacterial species are sufficient to distinguish between individuals with high and low bacterial richness, and even between lean and obese participants. Our classifications based on variation in the gut microbiome identify subsets of individuals in the general white adult population who may be at increased risk of progressing to adiposity-associated co-morbidities.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=staying-he...
Staying Healthy Takes Guts Full of Microbes

People whose intestines have smaller and less diverse bacterial populations are more prone to obesity and gut inflammation.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/352880/title/News_in_Bri...
News in Brief: Don't stand so close to me
Personal space has a measurable boundary

People have a sharp no-fly zone around their faces. Though its boundaries depend on the person, this discomfort zone usually starts between 20 and 40 centimeters away and continues right up to the face, researchers report August 28 in the Journal of Neuroscience. Threatening objects that enter this forbidden space are likely to trigger a strong defensive reaction. Scientists knew that this safety margin exists, but its boundaries hadn’t been measured.

http://www.gereports.com/the-art-of-science/
The Art of Science: Supercomputers Help Scientists See What Microscopes and Cameras Can’t Capture
Scientists at GE Global Research have been using the world’s most powerful supercomputers to simulate everything from fuel flowing through jet engine nozzles to water drops turning into ice. The results can be rewarding beyond solving research riddles. “Many times our work generates images that are visually breathtaking,” says Rick Arthur, who leads the Advanced Computing Lab at GRC.

Supercomputers are helping GE engineers speed up innovation, crack previously intractable problems, and shorten the business cycle.

http://www.examiner.com/article/new-study-finds-every-minute-of-exe...
New study finds every minute of exercise counts

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=poor-choices-finan...
Poor Choices: Financial Worries Can Impair One’s Ability to Make Sound Decisions

New research suggests causative link between income level and cognitive function

http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=adam-ruthe...
Adam Rutherford's Creation Science (The Real Kind) Part 2
http://www.amazon.com/Creation-Science-Reinventing-Itself-ebook/dp/...
Science journalist, author and Nature editor Adam Rutherford talks about new book Creation: How Science Is Reinventing Life Itself, which looks at the science of the origin of life and at the emerging science of synthetic biology.
Book Description
Publication Date: June 13, 2013
What is life?

Humans have been asking this question for thou­sands of years. But as technology has advanced and our understanding of biology has deepened, the answer has evolved. For decades, scientists have been exploring the limits of nature by modifying and manipulating DNA, cells and whole organisms to create new ones that could never have existed on their own.

In Creation, science writer Adam Rutherford explains how we are now radically exceeding the boundaries of evolution and engineering entirely novel creatures—from goats that produce spider silk in their milk to bacteria that excrete diesel to genetic circuits that identify and destroy cancer cells. As strange as some of these creations may sound, this new, synthetic biology is helping scientists develop radical solutions to some of the world’s most pressing crises—from food shortages to pandemic disease to climate change—and is paving the way for inventions once relegated to science fiction.

Meanwhile, these advances are shedding new light on the biggest mystery of all—how did life begin? We know that every creature on Earth came from a single cell, sparked into existence four billion years ago. And as we come closer and closer to understanding the ancient root that connects all living things, we may finally be able to achieve a second genesis—the creation of new life where none existed before.

Creation takes us on a journey four billion years in the making—from the very first cell to the ground-breaking biological inventions that will shape the future of our planet.

http://www.siliconindia.com/news/general/34000-Households-In-Bangal...
34,000 Households In Bangalore Prefer Technology Over Sanitation!

http://www.asianscientist.com/in-the-lab/pan-asian-wave-consumer-st...
Asian Consumers Still Very Traditional: Survey
A new study finds that traditional values continue to hold sway among Asia’s consumers, who value the family, believe in hard work, and are financially conservative.
Even as personal incomes have increased exponentially, in tandem with the region’s economic growth, a new study finds that traditional values continue to hold sway among Asia’s consumers – and companies would do well to appeal to these values in building their brands in the region.

The inaugural Pan-Asian Wave Consumer Study: Asian Marketing Trends and Consumer Insights, conducted by the Institute on Asian Consumer Insight (ACI) at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, has found that Asian consumers value the family, believe in hard work, and are financially conservative. They desire respect for the tremendous progress they have made, and yet shun flashy expressions of wealth.

ACI’s inaugural study for the Asian region polled almost 7,000 consumers from ten key economies in the region, in an extensive investigation of their needs, values, priorities, and beliefs. The six-month-long study was conducted in 14 languages, and received sponsorship from Blackberry, Coca-Cola, DBS Bank and Unilever.

http://www.asianscientist.com/in-the-lab/curry-ingredient-inspired-...
Curry Ingredient Helped Design Cancer Drugs
Researchers have combined features from an anti-nausea drug with a common South Asian kitchen spice to create more potent cancer drugs.

Q:What is it like living on Earth after living in space?
R: by Garrett Reisman, Former NASA Astronaut
First of all, the food is much better here on Earth. And taking showers and going to the bathroom are much easier to do here too.

But you do go through a strange adaptation process when you return to Earth. The first thing you notice is that everything seems really heavy. After 95 days on the International Space Station, I returned to Earth in the Space Shuttle Discovery. I took off my helmet and it felt like I was holding the anchor of the U.S.S. Nimitz in my hand. Oh great, I thought, how am I ever going to brush my teeth - the brush will be too heavy!

The next thing you notice is that your vestibular system is all messed up. Just sitting up took a lot of concentration. After about 15 minutes I was able to stand, but I would have keeled right over if there weren't a lot of things to hold onto in the middeck of Discovery.

You see, your brain is remarkably adaptable. After just a few days in space it figures out that your inner ear is producing nothing but garbage signals and so the brain turns the gains of those signals way down in its Kalman filter and cranks up the gains on your visual sensors, the eyes. Then all is well, until you come back to Earth. Now you need your inner ear sensor again, but the brain is still filtering it out. Gradually the brain re-calibrates, but it takes a while.

For me the process went pretty quickly. We don't know why, but anecdotally I can tell you that short and stocky people re-adapt more quickly than tall and lanky folks. This was only the second time in my life that being short came in handy. (The first time being during limbo contests at Bar Mitzvahs in New Jersey in the early 80s.)

After about an hour, I was able to walk around the Shuttle on the runway at the Kennedy Space Center and I was even able to go out to a local bar with my crewmates and I managed to eat half a cheeseburger and half a beer. On my second flight, STS-132, which was only about 2 weeks in duration, we went to the same bar and I had a whole cheeseburger and a whole glass of beer. So when people ask me what was the difference between a long-duration spaceflight and a short-duration spaceflight, I have a quantifiable answer: a half-cheeseburger and a half-beer!

Source: http://www.quora.com/Astronauts/What-is-it-like-living-on-Earth-aft...

http://www.quora.com/Airplanes/Can-an-airplanes-exit-door-be-opened...
Can an airplane's exit door be opened in mid-flight? If so, how much effort would it take?
Read the replies by clicking on the link

http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=vaccinated...
Vaccinated Kids Show No Long-Term Ill Effects

No measurable increase in risk for neurological conditions could be found in a large cohort of preadolescent children who had been vaccinated on schedule when infants.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pds.3482/abstract
Number of antigens in early childhood vaccines and neuropsychological outcomes at age 7–10 years

Shahed Iqbal1,*,
John P. Barile2,
William W. Thompson3,
Frank DeStefano1

ABSTRACT
Purpose

Concerns have been raised that children may be receiving too many immunizations under the recommended schedule in the USA. We used a publicly available dataset to evaluate the association between antibody-stimulating proteins and polysaccharides from early childhood vaccines and neuropsychological outcomes at age 7–10 years.
Methods

Children aged 7–10 years from four managed care organizations underwent standardized tests for domain-specific neuropsychological outcomes: general intellectual function, speech and language, verbal memory, attention and executive function, tics, achievement, visual spatial ability, and behavior regulation. Vaccination histories up to 24 months of age were obtained from medical charts, electronic records, and parents' records. Logistic regressions and structural equation modeling (SEM) were used to determine associations between total antigens up to 7, 12, and 24 months and domain-specific outcomes.
Results

On average, children (N = 1047) received 7266, 8127, and 10 341 antigens by ages 7, 12, and 24 months, respectively. For adjusted analyses, increase (per 1000) in the number of antigens was not associated with any neuropsychological outcomes. Antigen counts above the 10th percentile, compared with lower counts, were also not associated with any adverse outcomes. However, children with higher antigen counts up to 24 months performed better on attention and executive function tests (odds ratio for lower scores = 0.51, 95% confidence interval = 0.26, 0.99). Similar results were found with SEM analysis (b = 0.08, p = 0.02).
Conclusions

We did not find any adverse associations between antigens received through vaccines in the first two years of life and neuropsychological outcomes in later childhood. Published 2013. This article is a U.S. Government work and is in the public domain in the USA.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/slideshow.cfm?id=biotechs-first-m...
Biotech’s First Musical Instrument Plays Proteins Like Piano Keys [Slide Show]

A biophysicist and composer have banded together to create a music box that turns biology into sound

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0927024813003127
An artificial vasculature for adaptive thermal control of windows

Benjamin D. Hattona, b, 1,
Ian Wheeldona, 2,
Matthew J. Hancockd,
Mathias Kollea, b,
Joanna Aizenberga, b,
Donald E. Ingbe
Highlights

•

We demonstrate the fabrication of flexible, transparent microfluidic layers for window or solar panel cooling.
•

Experimental evaluation of cooling rates for fluidic layers as a function of flow rate, temperature.
•

Heat transfer model to evaluate the experimental results, and design scaled up implementation.
•

Optical absorption measurements, as a function of fluidic composition and color change.
•

Incorporating fluidic flow is a means to develop adaptive solar and window technologies.

Abstract

Windows are a major source of energy inefficiency in buildings. In addition, heating by thermal radiation reduces the efficiency of photovoltaic panels. To help reduce heating by solar absorption in both of these cases, we developed a thin, transparent, bio-inspired, convective cooling layer for building windows and solar panels that contains microvasculature with millimeter-scale, fluid-filled channels. The thin cooling layer is composed of optically clear silicone rubber with microchannels fabricated using microfluidic engineering principles. Infrared imaging was used to measure cooling rates as a function of flow rate and water temperature. In these experiments, flowing room temperature water at 2 mL/min reduced the average temperature of a model 10×10 cm2 window by approximately 7–9 °C. An analytic steady-state heat transfer model was developed to augment the experiments and make more general estimates as functions of window size, channel geometry, flow rate, and water temperature. Thin cooling layers may be added to one or more panes in multi-pane windows or as thin film non-structural central layers. Lastly, the color, optical transparency and aesthetics of the windows could be modulated by flowing different fluids that differ in their scattering or absorption properties.
Graphical abstract

A transparent, bio-inspired, convective cooling layer for building windows and solar panels has been developed to help reduce heating by solar absorption. The windows contain a vasculature network of millimeter-scale, fluid-filled channels. The design maintains a continuous flow of water to directly cool the window surface or change the optical absorption.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=computer-game-play...
Computer Game-Playing Shown to Improve Multitasking Skills

A new study reveals, despite polarized opinion about brain-training packages, that playing a 3-D race car-driving video game reduced cognitive decline in subjects aged 60-85

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=poor-choices-finan...
Poor Choices: Financial Worries Can Impair One’s Ability to Make Sound Decisions

New research suggests causative link between income level and cognitive function

The findings are detailed in the August 30 issue of Science.

New work by a team of psychologists and economists supports the notion that humans have limited bandwidth for decision-making. And the capacity to make choices can take a hit once that cognitive load becomes too heavy. The research, based on experimental data collected on people with varying levels of self-reported income in rural India and a New Jersey shopping mall, concludes simply that at least short-term financial stress can max out our mental reserves on par with the level of impairment that results from pulling an all-nighter.

Alternative issues that demand attention, such as calorie counting in a diet, also could reduce cognitive abilities. The difference with money, however, is that one can end a diet anytime; not so with financial stress.

These new results also support other research on an overlapping area of study—an emerging field called self-control, says Kathleen Vohs, a consumer behavior expert at the University of Minnesota who published an accompanying commentary piece on the findings in the same issue of Science.* Self-control studies look at the finite ability of individuals to overcome urges and make decisions. They posit, in a similar vein, that when individuals are faced with many decisions that demand trade-offs—such as a scarcity of food, time or money—and do not have a chance to recover from the resulting brain drain, self-control can tank. That depletion, in turn, could lead to decision-making patterns that impede one’s ability to improve their lot in life, she says. “Because the poor must overcome more urges and make difficult decisions more often than others, they are more likely to overeat, overspend and enact other problematic behaviors,” she wrote.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=psychologists-iden...
Rating the Best Ways to Study

Some study methods work in many different situations and across topics, boosting test performance and long-term retention. Learning how to learn can have lifelong benefits.
Self-testing and spreading out study sessions—so-called distributed practice—are excellent ways to improve learning. They are efficient, easy to use and effective.
Underlining and rereading, two methods that many students use, are ineffective and can be time-consuming.
Other learning techniques need further testing and evaluation. In the meantime, students and teachers can put proved study methods to use in classrooms and at home.

http://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?view=&srchtype=discussedNews&...
Upcoming conference on science journals
an upcoming science communication conference that you might be interested in attending or promoting. The topic of this conference is the evolving relationship between science journals and libraries, public education, research collaboration, university tenure, intellectual property rights, public policy, and more. Click here to view the event page.

This conference is being organized by the National Science Communication Institute (nSCI), a Seattle-based nonprofit whose mission is to improve the communication that happens inside science. You can read more about our group at www.nationalscience.org.

As far as we know, this will be one of the first conferences (if not the first) to really tackle the issue of journals head-on. Our hope is that we can share the knowledge and perspectives gained from this event, and then host other regional conferences and/or a national conference on this subject in 2014 with the goal of finding some common ground for change and improvement in how science journals intersect with research, education, policy, tenure, and more.

https://www.bigquestionsonline.com/content/why-does-higgs-particle-...

Why Does the Higgs Particle Matter?

http://esciencenews.com/articles/2013/09/08/climate.change.will.ups...
Climate change will upset vital ocean chemical cycles

Climate change will upset vital ocean chemical cycles
Published: Sunday, September 8, 2013 - 13:31 in Earth & Climate

New research from the University of East Anglia shows that rising ocean temperatures will upset natural cycles of carbon dioxide, nitrogen and phosphorus. Plankton plays an important role in the ocean's carbon cycle by removing half of all CO2 from the atmosphere during photosynthesis and storing it deep under the sea -- isolated from the atmosphere for centuries.

Findings published today in the journal Nature Climate Change reveal that water temperature has a direct impact on maintaining the delicate plankton ecosystem of our oceans.

The new research means that ocean warming will impact plankton, and in turn drive a vicious cycle of climate change.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/artificial-nose-scents-bl...
‘Artificial nose’ scents blood-poisoning bacteria

An “artificial nose” that could save lives by swiftly sniffing out blood-poisoning bacteria has been developed by scientists.

The device can test for the bugs in just 24 hours instead of the usual 72 and researchers hope it can be used to prevent sepsis, a potentially fatal condition. In some cases it can rapidly lead to septic shock, organ failure and death. An estimated 20 to 35 per cent of victims die.

The new device consists of a small plastic bottle with a chemical-sensing array or artificial nose attached to the inside. A blood sample is injected into the bottle, which is then shaken to agitate a nutrient solution and encourage bacteria to grow.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=why-people-believe...
Why People Believe in Conspiracy Theories [Preview]

Conspiracy theories offer easy answers by casting the world as simpler and more predictable than it is. Their popularity may pose a threat to societal well-being
Suspicious Minds

People who believe in one conspiracy theory are likely to espouse others, even when they are contradictory.
Conspiracy ideation is also linked with mistrust of science, including well-established findings, such as the fact that smoking can cause lung cancer.
Mere exposure to information supporting various fringe explanations can erode engagement in societal discourse.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=kenny-high-sugar-p...
High Sugar Plus Low Dopamine Could Hasten Diabetes and Obesity

Imbalance may prompt people to eat more

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/2013/09/09/floa...
Floating Brains and Invasive Minds

http://www.scidev.net/global/agriculture/opinion/farming-and-knowle...

Food needs can be met with a new vision for agriculture and science

http://www.scidev.net/global/gender/analysis-blog/focus-on-gender-c...

Climate change can trigger crises that lead to more violence against women

But the role of temperature-related aggression is more contentious

Such links must be closely examined given efforts to eliminate violence

http://www.scidev.net/global/conflict/news/climate-change-causes-ri...

• Past droughts or above-average temperatures have led to more violence

• Economic factors and food security may be key triggers of conflict in poor nations

• Future climate change is expected to substantially increase violent conflicts

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/353090/description/Meteo...
Meteorite that fell last year contains surprising molecules
Compounds in space rocks like the one that broke up over California may have helped seed life on Earth

http://www.nature.com/news/african-genes-tracked-back-1.13607
African genes tracked back

Method extends archaeological and linguistic data by tracing early human migration.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/07/son-doong_n_3873341.html?i...
World's Largest Cave