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

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-08/how-stop-plague-four-...
How To Stop A Plague In 4 Easy Steps
Vaccinating mosquitoes can ward off malaria.
It's not the mosquito’s fault. Malaria is actually caused by the Plasmodium family of parasites, which is carried unwittingly by mosquitoes. And these parasites are tricky foes. Come up with a treatment or vaccine and the few that survive will still breed. But Johns Hopkins biologist Rhoel Dinglasan thinks he may have a way around that: vaccinating mosquitoes instead.

Dinglasan’s team has found that Plasmodium—at a crucial stage in its life cycle—needs to bind to a protein in the mosquito’s gut called AnAPN1. If you block this protein, you block transmission to humans. But how do you treat a mosquito? A teensy needle and steady hands? No. Here’s the clever part: You give people a vaccine against AnAPN1, turning them into living mosquito-treatment factories for years; their immune systems produce antibodies against AnAPN1. When mosquitoes bite vaccinated people, they’ll suck up the antibodies, which block AnAPN1 so that the mosquitoes can no longer pass along the disease. In lab tests, Dinglasan has shown that the antibodies can indeed make mosquitoes benign—although no less annoying.
A. VACCINATE

Give someone the vaccine against the mosquito-gut protein AnAPN1.
B. MANUFACTURE

The person’s immune system produces antibodies against AnAPN1 in his blood.
C. BITE

A mosquito ingests the antibodies, which bind to AnAPN1 and block the malaria-causing parasite Plasmodium.
D. PREVENT

Plasmodium can’t live in the mosquito gut and, therefore, can’t be transmitted to people.

This article originally appeared in the September 2013 issue of Popular Science.

http://www.quora.com/Why-are-scientists-so-confident-that-their-the...
Why are scientists so confident that their theories are right, when history shows them to be wrong so often?

Scientists celebrating at CERN ( for not destroying the world!):

http://theconversation.com/lhc-celebrates-five-years-of-not-destroy...

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=physicists-net-fra...
Physicists Net Fractal Butterfly

A decades-old search has closed in on the recursive pattern that describes electron behavior

http://esciencenews.com/articles/2013/09/12/scientific.societies.fa...

Scientific societies face 'modern challenges'

Natural working gears evolved long back before human beings invented them!!

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/353276/description/Born_...
Born half a century ago, chaos theory languished for years before taking the sciences by storm

From:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/16/science-selfies-huffpost-s...

Health kick can reverse the ageing process

Study conducted by the University of California suggests our genes may be a predisposition - but they are not our fate
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/new-study-finds-health-ki...

About Proteins that cause mad cow disease:

Brian-eating proteins: Infectious agents called prions can resist standard sterilization and are difficult to diagnose, posing tough challenges for hospitals.

Prions are unusual pathogens distinct from parasites, fungi, bacteria and viruses. They are misfolded proteins that can transform healthy proteins into sickly versions, leading to the death of cells. Particularly abundant in the brain, they took center stage in the late 1980s, during the mad cow outbreak in the U.K.  People who ate beef from infected cows ran the risk of contracting a variant of CJD. The panic brought to light the range of prion diseases that can affect humans and animals, including one that develops spontaneously. Called sporadic CJD, this spontaneous form strikes about one in every million people each year for no apparent reason. What’s more, the brain tissue from the unlucky few can infect healthy brains—hence, the worry over surgical transmission.

Ensuring neurosurgical tools are free of prions is difficult chiefly because prions resist standard sterilization procedures. To disinfect metal instruments, hospitals put them in an autoclave and steam-heat them to 121 degrees Celsius for about 15 minutes. That’s far more than what’s needed to wipe out pathogens such as bacteria and viruses, which succumb to mere boiling temperatures in about one minute. Although autoclaving greatly weakens prions, the process may not entirely wipe out these malevolent proteins.

Even when cleaned with  benzene, alcohol and formaldehyde doesn't make it weak! why prion-free guarantees are impossible: the disease has a long incubation period—long enough that an infected person would seem quite healthy and arouse no suspicion among hospital staff. Months can pass—and many patients exposed—before surgeons might learn of a CJD case and pull the tools out of use. Currently, researchers have no way of definitively diagnosing sporadic CJD except by autopsy. The incubation period for prion diseases can span decades.  “But thankfully it is a very rare disease.” Currently, there is no plan to test the infectivity of the surgical tools, which remain in quarantine and will likely be destroyed.

Source: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=surgical-exposure-...

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-to-exploit-the...
How to Exploit the Power of Diverse Minds

A good idea can be powerful. Many of them, in a network of diverse minds, can be more powerful still

Big corporations used to midwife good ideas from the research laboratory to the marketplace, but in the future that task will increasingly fall to a partnership of governments, commercial firms and universities.
To get different nations and institutions collaborating effectively on generating new technologies, we need new rules.
China is a rising star when it comes to innovation, but a closer look reveals that much of that work takes place in the labs of multinational corporations operating on Chinese soil.
Even though nations may differ in their levels of technological output, it is possible to compare how efficient they are at exploiting scientific research.
Mexico has difficulty translating its vibrant research into commercial technology, but the current government is trying to change that, in part by luring expat scientists back home.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/353363/description/Vitam...
Vitamin stops static electricity
Clearing out uncharged molecules may prevent charge buildup

http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112952080/smells-grouped-into...
Just How Many Scents Can We Smell?
Of all the different odors and smells floating around the globe, scientists say humans can only detect ten basic categories of scents. Using a computerized model, sensory scientists now say they’ve developed a way to systematically categorize these smells.
After looking at smells through a mathematical model, the scientists say humans generally describe smells as either fragrant, woody/resinous, fruity (non-citrus), chemical, minty/peppermint, sweet, popcorn, and lemon. Perhaps some good news from this study: The scientists say there are only two categories which cause a human’s stomach to turn – those described as pungent and decayed.

http://esciencenews.com/articles/2013/09/19/coma.researchers.observ...

Coma: Researchers observe never-before-detected brain activity
Researchers from the University of Montreal and their colleagues have found brain activity beyond a flat line EEG, which they have called Nu-complexes (from the Greek letter n). According to existing scientific data, researchers and doctors had established that beyond the so-called "flat line" (flat electroencephalogram or EEG), there is nothing at all, no brain activity, no possibility of life. This major discovery suggests that there is a whole new frontier in animal and human brain functioning. The researchers observed a human patient in an extreme deep hypoxic coma under powerful anti-epileptic medication that he had been required to take due to his health issues. "Dr. Bogdan Florea from Romania contacted our research team because he had observed unexplainable phenomena on the EEG of a coma patient. We realized that there was cerebral activity, unknown until now, in the patient's brain," says Dr. Florin Amzica, director of the study and professor at the University of Montreal's School of Dentistry.

Dr. Amzica's team then decided to recreate the patient's state in cats, the standard animal model for neurological studies. Using the anesthetic isoflurane, they placed the cats in an extremely deep -- but completely reversible -- coma. The cats passed the flat (isoelectric) EEG line, which is associated with silence in the cortex (the governing part of the brain). The team observed cerebral activity in 100% of the cats in deep coma, in the form of oscillations generated in the hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for memory and learning processes. These oscillations, unknown until now, were transmitted to the master part of the brain, the cortex. The researchers concluded that the observed EEG waves, or Nu-complexes, were the same as those observed in the human patient.

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

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://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=ovulating-women-ar...
Ovulating Women Are Less Trusting

Women approaching peak fertility are more cautious when interacting with strangers
When women approach their most fertile time of the month, they tend to prefer potential sexual partners with more outward signs of genetic fitness, such as facial symmetry, according to past research. Now scientists find that women behave differently toward strangers in a nonsexual context, too. A paper in the April Biological Psychology showed that women near ovulation were less willing to trust strangers in an investment game, especially if the strangers were male and even more so if they were attractive men. Higher levels of the hormone estradiol, which peaks just before ovulation, were associated with less trust—a sign that the women's heightened wariness has roots in the physiology of the menstrual cycle. The finding supports the idea that at ovulation, women may unconsciously temper their increased attraction to masculine men by interacting with them more cautiously.

http://bcove.me/s0qyohop
DIY: Chemistry, art equals science to dye for

How the Seahorse Got its Shape from Steph Y on Vimeo.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=why-we-should-choo...
Why We Should Choose Science over Beliefs

Ideology needs to give way

By Michael Shermer

How to Unlock Life-Changing Technologies Now Waiting in the Labs

Miniature robots, personalized drugs and other potentially life-changing technologies lie waiting in the laboratory, lacking support. Here's how to fix the problem
State of the World's Science 2013 The growing connectedness of the world and the rising contribution of scientists and engineers from all continents have broadened the possibilities for human creativity »
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-to-unlock-life...

Box from Bot & Dolly on Vimeo.

https://soundcloud.com/fieldoffragments#!
New climate change report, 2013
Global Warming Is Real IPCC Repeats
The IPCC notes again that climate change is unequivocal so the question becomes what will be done to restrain its impacts

The oceans absorbing the majority of the extra heat trapped by greenhouse gases as well as the cooling contributions of volcanic eruptions.

After all, 1983-2012 appears to have been the warmest period in at least the last 1400 years and the last decade alone is the warmest on record.

there's more than enough coal, oil and natural gas left in the ground to cook the climate. That's part of the reason why the IPCC included a final paragraph on geoengineering, or large-scale attempts to alter the climate by either blocking sunlight or removing CO2 (or other greenhouse gases) from the atmosphere. Of course, there's "limited evidence" and "insufficient knowledge" about whether such approaches could even work, particularly without their own side effects, the IPCC notes.

And keep this in mind, some of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere today will persist for centuries. Even if CO2 emissions stopped tomorrow, climate change would continue. In other words, humanity is in the process of setting the Earth's thermostat. The world has already warmed by roughly 0.85 degree C since 1880 and further heat extremes are "virtually certain." So the question is: how much hotter can we stand? Or as United Nations Secretary General Ban-ki Moon put it in a video address to the IPCC press conference: "The heat is on. Now we must act."