Science Today

New scientists twitter competition led to more than 500 tweets regarding this subject and you can find top ten tweets that tried to explain what it exactly is. Here we go. Timeless energy, / all dressed up, no place to go: / had to create space. / - #BigBang #haiku #sci140 - haiQ God said delB=0 etc, & then light (sym breaking), separation light from darkness (recombination), man created from dirt (evolution) #sci140 - dmadance #sci140 starburst, molecule, amino acid, protein, cell development, cell division, sex, technology, war, religion, OK magazine. - jonotrumpeto @newscientist #sci140 Antimatter and matter duke it out. Matter wins 1 billion and one to 1 billion. The matter left expands and makes us. - zeroentropy @newscientist . #sci140 A place for everything, and everything in one place. Then -- kaboom, everything all over the place. - tui4 @newscientist The Big Bang: the moment the universe vanishes when extrapolating its expansion backwards into the past #sci140 - hubi1857 ...

Its a weird thing to see yahoo's logo for MSN page in my bookmarks. Is this common?

All animals, including humans, have an internal 24-hour clock or circadian rhythm that creates a daily oscillation of body temperature, brain activity, hormone production and metabolism. Studying mice, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Northwestern University found how the biological circadian clock mechanism communicates with processes that govern aging and metabolism. Their findings can potentially explain why the waning of the circadian rhythm with age could contribute to age-related disorders such as insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. "Our study establishes a detailed scheme linking metabolism and aging to the circadian rhythm," says one of the lead authors, Shin-ichiro Imai, M.D., Ph.D., who researches aging at Washington University School of Medicine. "This opens the door to new avenues for treating age-related disorders and ways to restore a healthy daily circadian rhythm. It could also yield new interventions to allevia...

Native African people who have never even listened to the radio before can nonetheless pick up on happy, sad, and fearful emotions in Western music, according to a new report published online on March 19th in Current Biology. The result shows that the expression of those three basic emotions in music can be universally recognized, the researchers said. "These findings could explain why Western music has been so successful in global music distribution, even in music cultures that do not as strongly emphasize the role of emotional expression in their music," said Thomas Fritz of the Max-Planck-Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences. The expression of emotions is a basic feature of Western music, and the capacity of music to convey emotional expressions is often regarded as a prerequisite to its appreciation in Western cultures, the researchers explained. In other musical traditions, however, music is often appreciated for other qualities, such as group coordination in...

Wash away your gray? Maybe. A team of European scientists have finally solved a mystery that has perplexed humans throughout the ages: why we turn gray. Despite the notion that gray hair is a sign of wisdom, these researchers show that wisdom has nothing to do with it. Going gray is caused by a massive build up of hydrogen peroxide due to wear and tear of our hair follicles. The peroxide winds up blocking the normal synthesis of melanin, our hair's natural pigment. "Not only blondes change their hair color with hydrogen peroxide," said Gerald Weissmann, MD, Editor-in-Chief of The FASEB Journal. "All of our hair cells make a tiny bit of hydrogen peroxide, but as we get older, this little bit becomes a lot. We bleach our hair pigment from within, and our hair turns gray and then white. This research, however, is an important first step to get at the root of the problem, so to speak." The researchers made this discovery by examining cell cultures of human hair foll...

According to Virgil Griffith, smart people and dumb people can be figured out by the music they like. see it for yourself here .

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo .

You know the feeling. You make a decision you're certain is merely a "lucky guess." A new study from Northwestern University offers precise electrophysiological evidence that such decisions may sometimes not be guesswork after all. The research utilizes the latest brain-reading technology to point to the surprising accuracy of memories that can't be consciously accessed. During a special recognition test, guesses turned out to be as accurate or more accurate than when study participants thought they consciously remembered. "We may actually know more than we think we know in everyday situations, too," said Ken Paller, professor of psychology at Northwestern. "Unconscious memory may come into play, for example, in recognizing the face of a perpetrator of a crime or the correct answer on a test. Or the choice from a horde of consumer products may be driven by memories that are quite alive on an unconscious level." The study links lucky guesses to vali...

Markets need regulation to stay stable. We have had thirty years of financial deregulation. Now we are seeing chickens coming home to roost. This is the key argument of Professor Nick Bingham, a mathematician at Imperial College London, in an article published today in Significance, the magazine of the Royal Statistical Society. There is no such thing as laying off risk if no one is able to insure it. Big new risks were taken in extending mortgages to far more people than could handle them, in the search for new markets and new profits. Attempts to insure these by securitisation – aptly described in this case as putting good and bad risks into a blender and selling off the results to whoever would buy them – gave us toxic debt, in vast quantities. "Once the scale of the problem was unmistakably clear from corporate failure of big names in the financial world, banks stopped lending to each other," says Bingham. "They couldn't quantify their own exposure to toxic debt ...

This is so shocking…….wish black money deposits was an Olympics event….India would have won a gold medal hands down. The second best Russia has 4 times lesser deposit. US is not even there in the counting in top five !! India has more money in swiss banks than all the other countries combined Recently, due to international pressure, Swiss govt. agreed to disclose the names of the account holders only if the respective govts formally asked for it. Indian govt. is not asking for the details…….no marks for guessing why ???? We need to start a movement to pressurize the govt. to do so !! this is perhaps the only way, and a golden opportunity, to expose the high and mighty and weed out corruption !! Please read on……and forward to all the honest Indians to…..like somebody is forwarding to you…….and build a ground-swell of support for action !! Is India poor, who says? Ask Swiss banks With personal account deposit bank of $1500 billion in foreign reserve which have been misappropriated, an am...

It's the mobile phone that could leave you with more than a warm ear. As startled Italian police discovered, the device seized in a raid on a Mafia gang is actually a pistol. The phone gun - complete with a dummy display - holds four .22 bullets. It was fully loaded and ready to be used when it was found in Naples. The phone transformed into a gun by sliding the keypad section. The stubby antenna is the barrel, and a touch on a particular key fires a bullet. As reported by Dailymail , a police spokesman said: 'This is the first time such a weapon has been seized and shows the sophistication that the crime syndicates are turning to. 'Tests are being carried out to see if it has been used recently or has been involved in any shooting attacks.' The raid in a Naples suburb was part of an operation against the Gionta crime family of the Camorra, the port city's version of the Mafia. Officers from the paramilitary Carabinieri police also seized two ordinary handguns, am...

A VERY SPECIAL THANKSGIVING WISHES TO ALL AMERICAN READERS

It is only a matted ball of hair. But it puts scientists a step closer to bringing the woolly mammoth back from the dead. They have unscrambled the prehistoric giant's DNA using samples of hair frozen in Siberian ice for thousands of years. The genetic code has shed new light on how mammoths evolved - and revealed that they are far closer to modern day elephants than anyone previously realised. The discovery could also allow researchers to tinker with the genetic make-up of an elephant and recreate the long extinct mammoth. The Jurassic Park-style research was carried out using DNA from the remains of two mammoths frozen in the Siberian permafrost. One had been buried for 20,000 years, the other for least 60,000, the American scientists report today in the journal Nature. By carefully analysing the DNA, the team have pieced together a draft version of 80 per cent of the mammoth's genome - or genetic code. The findings show that woolly mammothsand elephants are closely relat...

I found an amazing art of origami on insects. These are a few of them. You can find more for yourself here . Enjoy the art of origami.

This neat video explains pretty much about American politics and the way they choose their president. It was helpful to me as I get confused about the whole process. Hope its helpful to you too. Enjoy the video from commoncraft.

Bangladesh, one of the world's 49 least developed countries (LDCs) described as the poorest of the poor, is calling for the creation of a global food bank. "We have suggested that a Food Bank could allow countries facing a short-term shortfall in production to borrow food grains on preferential terms," says Bangladeshi Prime Minister Fakhruddin Ahmed, who was in New York last week to address the General Assembly. Once they overcome the shortfall, these countries could return the quantum to the Food Bank, he added. At a summit meeting of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) last August, the leaders of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka reiterated their own proposal for a regional food bank. "We direct that the SAARC Food Bank be urgently operationalised," said the declaration adopted at the conclusion of the meeting in the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo. The summit also directed that an ...

Those who worship a higher power often do so in different ways. Whether they are active in their religious community, or prefer to simply pray or meditate, new research out of Temple University suggests that a person's religiousness – also called religiosity – can offer insight into their risk for depression. Lead researcher Joanna Maselko, Sc.D., characterized the religiosity of 918 study participants in terms of three domains of religiosity: religious service attendance, which refers to being involved with a church; religious well-being, which refers to the quality of a person's relationship with a higher power; and existential well-being, which refers to a person's sense of meaning and their purpose in life. In a study published on-line this month in Psychological Medicine, Maselko and fellow researchers compared each domain of religiosity to their risk of depression, and were surprised to find that the group with higher levels of religious well-being were 1.5 times more...

Psychologists from the University of Toronto have developed a personality inventory that can predict who will excel in academic and creative domains, even when respondents are trying hard to fake their answers. Study authors note that personality questionnaires have a long history of predicting real-world performance, but have been plagued by the problem of biased responding. "It's very common for people to try and make themselves look better than they actually are on these questionnaires, especially if they know they are being evaluated," said Jordan B. Peterson, psychology professor at the University of Toronto and co-author of the paper. "This sort of faking can distort the predictive validity of these tests, with significant negative economic consequences. We wanted to develop a measure that could predict real-world performance even in the absence of completely honest responding." The research findings demonstrate that traditional personality inventories fa...

Sunnybrook researcher Dr. Donald Redelmeier and Stanford University statistician Robert Tibshirani have found an increased risk of fatal motor vehicle crashes on United States (US) presidential election days. “We thought efforts that mobilize about 55 per cent of the population to vote, along with US reliance on motor vehicle travel, might result in increased fatal motor vehicle crashes during US presidential elections,” says Redelmeier, lead investigator of the study and staff physician at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, “indeed, we found a significant increase in traffic deaths on election days.” The investigation looked at all US presidential election days over the last 32 years, from Jimmy Carter in 1976 to George Bush in 2004, during the hours of polling. They also looked at the same hours on the Tuesday immediately before and immediately after as control days. Their main finding was that the average presidential election led to about 24 deaths from motor vehicle crashes. Ex...