"We found that any two people may share tens of thousands of the exact same T-cell receptor. This is contrary to previous dogma that each person has a distinct set of T-cell receptors with little or no overlap between people," said Dr Harlan Robins, a computational biologist and an assistant member of the Public Health Sciences Division at the Hutchinson Centre.

The findings have diagnostic and therapeutic potential for auto-immune diseases and cancer.

"The strong similarity in the adaptive immune cells between different people suggests that the same disease will induce the same response in different people," Dr Robins said.

"The technology... can readily detect such a response, even if the magnitude of the immune reaction is small."

"Therefore, we potentially could use one or more of these shared T-cell responses as a diagnostic for a particular disease."

For the study, Dr Robins and his colleagues sequenced more than five million T-cell receptor DNA strands from each of seven healthy donors.

After comparing these sequences, they found two primary results.

Firstly, the set of T-cell receptor sequences used by the human immune system is not a random cross section of all the possibilities, but a small subset with consistent properties that the scientists subsequently identified.

"Each person's adaptive immune system is far more alike than expected," said Dr Robins.

Secondly, pair-wise comparisons of the T-cell receptors in the seven donors revealed that that tens of thousands of identical receptors are shared by each pair, even in people of different ethnicities.

"The results of our paper suggest that a specific set of T-cells that we can now detect are likely to play a causative role in the disease," Dr Robins said.

"Further, we can detect this targeted set much earlier than present diagnostics, perhaps saving vital cell function with the preventive administration of currently available therapeutics."

"And because the T-cell clones are causative of the disease, they also double as therapeutic targets."

"In principle, a monoclonal antibody could be developed to target these T-cell clones and prevent the autoimmune attack."

"Effectively, the immune system is an amplifier."

"So a very small tumor has the potential to induce a magnified immune response."

"We are readily able to detect such a response."

"The results of this paper suggest that multiple patients might have a similar response to the same type of tumour."

"Therefore, detection of these similar responses could be an early diagnostic for certain types of cancer."

"There has been a huge outpouring of research about host defense that has overshadowed the many diverse activities that these cells do all the time," said Professor Dr David Mosser of the University of Maryland's College of Chemical and Life Sciences.

"We'd like to dispel the narrow notion that most people have that macrophages' only role is defence, and expand it to include their role in homeostasis."

"It might be possible to manipulate macrophages to make better vaccines, prevent immunosuppression, or develop novel therapeutics that promote anti-inflammatory immune responses."

But certain harmful microbes, such as the tropical parasite Leishmania spp., can exploit wound-healing macrophages, said Dr. Mosser.

"If you have a macrophage whose job it is to promote wound-healing, that macrophage will not be capable of killing microbes," he said.

"The microbe can enter the macrophage and survive inside, which is not good for the human host."

Understanding how Leishmania exploits macrophages has led to a better understanding of how macrophages function in health and disease.

It has also stressed the importance of treating infections early, before the bugs can wreak havoc on the immune system.

"This was a rare opportunity to gain insight into the jury's deliberative process," said Professor Dr Joann Keyton of North Carolina State University and co-author of the study.

"As far as we know, this is the only jury transcript available for study from a death penalty case."

Keyton and her co-author, Dr Stephenson Beck of North Dakota State University, were struck by the amount of laughter.

"This was intriguing," Professor Keyton said.

"We're interested in how people communicate within a group in order to accomplish a task, and we saw this as an opportunity to explore the role of laughter in how people signal support -- or lack of support -- for other people's positions within a group."

Keyton noted that there is very little research on the role of laughter in communication, particularly when divorced from humour.

The researchers learned that laughter could be used as a tool, intentionally and strategically, to control communication and affect group dynamics.

For example, one juror was very vocal and made it clear early in the case that she was opposed to the death penalty.

In one instance, when that juror agreed with other jury members, one of the other members said 'She's so smart,' resulting in laughter from other members of the group.

"That had the effect of further distancing her from the rest of the jury," Keyton said.

"When juries form, they don't know each other."

"So part of the jury process is to create relationships within the group -- for example, figuring out who thinks like me, who will have the same position I have."

"There are power dynamics at play."

"Laughter matters, even when it is a serious group task."

"Laughter is natural, but we try to suppress it in formal settings."

"So, when it happens, it's worth closer examination."

At one point, the jury was unclear on whether a sentence related to one of the charges was for 30 days or 30 years.

This confusion led to widespread laughter.

"The laughter allowed the jurors to release some tension, while also allowing them to acknowledge they had made an error -- so they could move forward with that error corrected," Keyton said.

"Laughter is one way of dealing with ambiguity and tension in situations where a group is attempting to make consequential decisions and informal power dynamics are in play."

"There are very few opportunities to see group decision making, with major consequences, in a public setting."

"It is usually done in private, such as in corporate board meetings or judicial proceedings."

"But laughter is something that occurs frequently, and not only because something is funny."

"Nobody in the jury was laughing at jokes."

Image credit: David Shankbone / CC A-SA 3.0

"We are seeing an increase in the number of patients addicted to prescription drugs, so we wanted to better understand how they first got hooked," said Professor Richard Blondell of the University of Buffalo and senior author on the study.

"This information suggests that there is a progressive nature to opioid use, and that prescription opioids can be the gateway to illicit drug addiction."

"It also tells us that people who use prescriptions illegally may be at greater risk for subsequent heroin use than those who use prescriptions legally."

Slightly more than half of the study group -- 51 per cent -- said they first used the drugs for post-surgical pain, back pain or after an injury.

49 percent said that they were curious and/or someone they were with had the drugs.

Those who became addicted from using drugs legally prescribed for pain were more likely to be older, female, have a university degree, and more likely to take their drugs orally, rather than nasally or via injection.

Users' comments on how they got started using drugs other than for pain, and why they continued, were revealing.

'Pill parties' were a common starting point.

One person said the drug 'was handed to me by my friend, this guy I know, someone who was at the party.'

Another patient said young people are using it "like Viagra.'

When asked if any doctor had ever asked about a substance use problem before writing a prescription, of the 53 participants who answered the question, 74 per cent said no.

Professor Blondell emphasised that the prescribing physician is in the best position to prevent or address addiction in their patients.

"I tell patients that addiction can be an unintended side-effect that occurs occasionally with the use of these medications," he said.

"Doctors need to be able to help them if this occurs, so doctors will need to monitor the use of these medications closely."

"I also tell patients to discard unused medication ASAP to prevent addiction in themselves and those, such as teenage family members, who might get their hands on these leftover pills."

Image credit: Bill Barber / CC BY-NC 2.0

"You can’t ignore that chocolate is a relatively calorie-dense food and large amounts of habitual consumption is going to raise your risks for weight gain," said lead researcher Dr Murrray Mittleman, director of the Cardiovascular Epidemiology Research Unit at Harvard Medical School’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

"But if you’re going to have a treat, dark chocolate is probably a good choice, as long as it’s in moderation."

High concentration of compounds called 'flavonoids' in chocolate may lower blood pressure, among other benefits, according to mostly short-term studies.

But this is the first study to show long-term outcomes related specifically to heart failure, which can result from ongoing untreated high blood pressure.

Dr Mittleman said differences in chocolate quality affect the study’s implications for Americans.

Higher cocoa content is associated with greater heart benefits.

In Sweden, even milk chocolate has a higher cocoa concentration than dark chocolate sold in the United States.

Also, the average serving size for Swedish women in the study ranged from 19 grams among those 62 and older, to 30 grams among those 61 and younger.

In contrast, the standard American portion size is 20 grams.

"Those tempted to use these data as their rationale for eating large amounts of chocolate or engaging in more frequent chocolate consumption are not interpreting this study appropriately," said Professor Dr Linda Van Horn of Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.

"This is not an ‘eat all you want’ take-home message, rather it’s that eating a little dark chocolate can be healthful, as long as other adverse behaviours do not occur, such as weight gain or excessive intake of non-nutrient dense ‘empty’ calories."

"Anyone needing access to large-area nanoscale patterns on the cheap could benefit from this method," said Professor Teri W. Odom of the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.

"It is a simple, low-cost and high-throughput nanopatterning method that can be done in any laboratory."

Shrinky Dinks are large flexible sheets which are heated in an oven.

When exposed to heat, they shrink to small hard plates without altering their colour or shape.

The new technique utilises this property to manipulate the electronic, photonic and magnetic properties of nanomaterials.

It also easily controls a pattern's size and symmetry and can be used to produce millions of copies of the pattern over a large area.

Potential applications include devices that take advantage of nanoscale patterns, such as solar cells, high-density displays, computers, and chemical and biological sensors.

Solvent-assisted nanoscale embossing (SANE) can increase the spacing of patterns up to 100 per cent as well as decrease them down to 50 per cent in a single step, merely by stretching or heating (shrinking) the polymer substrate (the Shrinky Dinks material).

Also, SANE can reduce critical feature sizes as small as 45 per cent compared to the master by controlled swelling of patterned polymer moulds with different solvents.

SANE works from the nanoscale to the macroscale.

"No other existing nanopatterning method can both prototype arbitrary patterns with small separations and reproduce them over six-inch wafers for less than US$100," Professor Odom said.

The team unearthed the 3.5 metre circular structure next to an ancient lake at Star Carr, near Scarborough.

They are currently excavating a large wooden platform next to the lake, made of timbers which have been split and hewn.

This platform is the earliest known evidence of carpentry in Europe.

The house itself predates what was previously Britain's oldest known dwelling at Howick, Northumberland, by at least 500 years.

The wooden dwelling at Star Carr, which was first excavated by the team two years ago, had post holes around a central hollow which would have been filled with organic matter such as reeds, and possibly a fireplace.

"This exciting discovery marries world-class research with the lives of our ancestors," said David Willetts, Universities and Science Minister.

"It brings out the similarities and differences between modern life and the ancient past in a fascinating way, and will change our perceptions for ever."

"I congratulate the research team and look forward to their future discoveries."

The site was inhabited by hunter gatherers from just after the last ice age, for a period of between 200 and 500 years.

They would have migrated from an area now under the North Sea, hunting animals including deer, wild boar, elk and enormous wild cattle known as auroch.

Though they did not cultivate the land, the inhabitants did burn part of the landscape to encourage animals to eat shoots and they also kept domesticated dogs.

"This is a sensational discovery and tells us so much about the people who lived at this time," said Dr Nicky Milner of the University of York.

"From this excavation, we gain a vivid picture of how these people lived."

"For example, it looks like the house may have been rebuilt at various stages."

"It is also likely there was more than one house and lots of people lived here."

"The platform is made of hewn and split timbers -- the earliest evidence of this type of carpentry in Europe."

"And the artefacts of antler, particularly the antler head-dresses, are intriguing as they suggest ritual activities."

The discoveries mean we could have to re-think our assumptions about how people lived in the Stone Age.

"This changes our ideas of the lives of the first settlers to move back into Britain after the end of the last Ice Age," said Dr Chantal Conneller of the University of Manchester.

"We used to think they moved around a lot and left little evidence."

"Now we know they built large structures and were very attached to particular places in the landscape."

"In these professions being attractive was highly detrimental to women," said Professor Stefanie Johnson of the University of Colorado Denver Business School.

"In every other kind of job, attractive women were preferred. This wasn't the case with men which shows that there is still a double standard when it comes to gender."

According to Johnson, beautiful people still enjoy significant benefits on the whole.

They tend to get higher salaries, better performance evaluations, higher levels of admission to college, better voter ratings when running for public office, and more favourable judgements in trials.

But in certain niches, beauty can be a hindrance -- something researchers have called the 'beauty is beastly' effect.

"In two studies, we found that attractiveness is beneficial for men and women applying for most jobs, in terms of ratings of employment suitability," according to the study.

"However, attractiveness was more beneficial for women applying for feminine sex-typed jobs than masculine sex-typed jobs."

In one experiment, participants were given a list of jobs and photos of applicants and told to sort them according to their suitability for the job.

They had a stack of 55 male and 55 female photos.

In job categories such as director of security, hardware salesperson, prison guard and tow truck driver, attractive women were overlooked.

Attractive women tended to be sorted into positions like receptionist or secretary.

"One could argue that, under certain conditions, physical appearance may be a legitimate basis for hiring," Professor Johnson said.

"In jobs involving face-to-face client contact, such as sales, more physically attractive applicants could conceivably perform better than those who are less attractive."

"However it is important that if physical attractiveness is weighed equally for men and women to avoid discrimination against women."

Researchers at the University of California, Riverside, asked hearing individuals with no formal lip-reading experience to watch a silent face articulate 80 simple words.

Those individuals were asked to identify the words by saying them out loud clearly and quickly.

To make the lip-reading task easier, the test subjects were given a choice of two possible words.

They were never asked to imitate or repeat the talker.

Researchers discovered that words spoken by the test subjects sounded more like the words of the talker they lip-read than words spoken when read from a list.

That finding provided compelling evidence that unintentional speech imitation extends to lip-reading, even for normal hearing individuals with no formal lip-reading experience.

"Whether we are hearing or lipreading speech articulations, a talker’s speaking style has subtle influences on our own manner of speaking," said Professor Lawrence D. Rosenblum of the University of California, Riverside.

"This unintentional imitation could serve as a social glue, helping us to affiliate and empathize with each other."

"But it also might reflect deep aspects of the language function."

"Specifically, it adds to evidence that the speech brain is sensitive to -- and primed by -- speech articulation, whether heard or seen."

"It also adds to the evidence that a familiar talker’s speaking style can help us recognise words."

Image credit: Bekah Healey / CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

As neither virus family is known to insert its genetic material into the host genome during replication, the discovery was all the more unexpected.

"This was a surprise for us," said Dr Anna Marie Skalka of the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia.

"It says that the source of our genetic material is considerably wider than we thought."

"It includes our own genes and unexpected viral genes as well."

Researchers compared 5,666 viral genes from all known non-retroviral families with single-stranded RNA genomes to the genomes of 48 vertebrate species, including humans.

In doing so, they uncovered 80 separate viral sequence integrations into 19 different vertebrate species.

Interestingly, nearly all of the viral sequences come from ancient relatives of just two viral families, the Ebola/Marburgviruses and Bornaviruses, both of which cause haemorrhagic fevers and neurological disease.

"These viruses are RNA viruses," Dr Skalka said.

"They replicate their RNA and are not known to make any DNA."

"And they have no known mechanism for getting their genetic material integrated into the DNA of the host genome."

"Indeed, some of them don't even enter the nucleus when they replicate."

That the sequences, some of which may have been integrated into the genomes more than 40 million years ago, have been largely conserved over evolutionary time suggests that they give the host a selective advantage -- perhaps protecting them from future viral infection.

"In a way, one might even think of these integrations as genomic vaccinations," said Dr Skalka.

"Whether you like it or not, Google, Facebook, Walmart and the government are building profiles of you, and these consist of hundreds of attributes describing you," said Professor Suresh Venkatasubramanian of the University of Utah.

"If you line them up for each person, you have a line of hundreds of numbers that paint a picture of a person -- who they are, what their interests are, who their friends are and so forth."

"These strings of hundreds of attributes are called high-dimensional data because each attribute is called one dimension."

"Data mining is about digging up interesting information from this high-dimensional data."

A group of data-mining methods dubbed 'multidimensional scaling' (MDS) first developed in the 1930s has been used ever since to make data analysis simpler by reducing the dimensionality of the data.

Professor Venkatasubramanian described MDS as 'probably one of the most important tools in data mining and is used by countless researchers everywhere.'

But Professor Venkatasubramanian and colleagues have now devised a new method of multidimensional scaling that is faster, simpler, can be used for a wider range of problems and can handle more data.

"Data mining means finding patterns, relationships and correlations in high-dimensional data," Professor Venkatasubramanian said.

"You literally are digging through the data to find little veins of information."

"The challenge of data mining is dealing with the dimensionality of the data and the volume of it."

"So one expression common in the data mining community is 'the curse of dimensionality.'"

"The curse of dimensionality is the observed phenomenon that as you throw in more attributes to describe individuals, the data mining tasks you wish to perform become exponentially more difficult."

"We are now at the point where the dimensionality and size of the data is a big problem."

"It makes things computationally very difficult to find these patterns we want to find."

The new method can handle large amounts of data because 'rather than trying to analyse the entire set of data as a whole, we analyze it incrementally, sort of person by person," said Professor Venkatasubramanian.

That speeds up data mining 'because you don't need to have all the data in front of you before you start reducing its dimensionality.'

Professor Venkatasubramanian acknowledged that there are privacy concerns around data mining, but also highlighted the potential benefits to consumers.

"The issue of privacy in data mining is like any set of potentially negative consequences of scientific advances," he said.

"If you target advertising based on what people need, it becomes useful."

"The better the advertising gets, the more it becomes useful information and not advertising."

"And the way we are being inundated with all forms of information in today's world, whether we like it or not we have no choice but to allow machines and automated systems to sift through all this to make sense of the deluge of information passing our eyes every day."

"We found what are now the largest molecules known to exist in space," said astronomer Jan Cami of the University of Western Ontario.

"We are particularly excited because they have unique properties that make them important players for all sorts of physical and chemical processes going on in space."

Buckyballs are molecules made from 60 carbon atoms arranged in a three-dimensional sphere.

Their alternating patterns of hexagons and pentagons are similar to the geodesic domes popularised by Buckminster Fuller -- hench buckyballs, more formally known as buckminsterfullerene.

The Cami team unexpectedly found the carbon balls while observing a planetary nebula named Tc 1.

The buckyballs were found in the clouds surrounding the white dwarf star at the heart of the nebule -- perhaps reflecting a short stage in the star's life, when it sloughs off a burst of material rich in carbon.

"We did not plan for this discovery," Cami said.

"But when we saw these whopping spectral signatures, we knew immediately that we were looking at one of the most sought-after molecules."

Sir Harry Kroto, Nobel prize winning co-discoverer of buckyballs, said: "This most exciting breakthrough provides convincing evidence that the buckyball has, as I long suspected, existed since time immemorial in the dark recesses of our galaxy."

"Generating broadly neutralising antibodies to multiple strains of influenza in animals through vaccination is an important milestone in the quest for a universal influenza vaccine," said Dr Anthony S. Fauci, NIAID director.

"This significant advance lays the groundwork for the development of a vaccine to provide long-lasting protection against any strain of influenza."

"A durable and effective universal influenza vaccine would have enormous ramifications for the control of influenza, a disease that claims an estimated 250,000 to 500,000 lives annually, including an average of 36,000 in the United States."

Dr Gary J. Nabel of NIAID and his colleagues first primed mice, ferret and monkey immune systems with a vaccine made from DNA encoding the influenza virus hemagglutinin (HA) surface protein.

After being primed with the DNA vaccine, the mice and ferrets received a booster dose of the 2006-2007 seasonal influenza vaccine or a vaccine made from a weakened cold adenovirus containing HA flu protein.

Monkeys were boosted with the seasonal flu vaccine only.

The prime-boost vaccine stimulated an immune response to the stem of the lollipop-shaped hemagglutinin of influenza virus.

Unlike HA's head -- which mutates readily, allowing the virus to become unrecognisable to antibodies -- the stem varies relatively little from strain to strain.

In principle, antibodies generated against the stem of HA should be able to recognise and neutralise multiple flu strains.

"We are excited by these results," said Dr Nabel.

"The prime-boost approach opens a new door to vaccinations for influenza that would be similar to vaccination against such diseases as hepatitis, where we vaccinate early in life and then boost immunity through occasional, additional inoculations in adulthood."

"Originally there were sardines in the area but over fishing caused the sardine population to collapse in the 1960s and 1970s," said Professor Victoria A. Braithwaite of Penn State University.

"The sardines never recovered and jellyfish became a huge and serious problem, eating what the sardines had eaten."

Jellyfish are considered a dead-end food source as they eat lots of small fish and other sea creatures -- but they have few predators.

However the bearded goby, Sufflogobius bibarbatus, a 4-to-6-inch long, 1.5 inch-wide fish, eats jellyfish.

Larger fish, sea mammals, and sea birds eat gobies -- putting jellyfish back into the food cycle.

"We don't know if they are eating dead jellyfish from the bottom, or if they are coming up to oxygen-filled layers to eat jellyfish, but they are eating jellyfish," Professor Braithwaite said.

Stranger still is the gobies' use of the dead zone in the area.

One reason there were so many sardines and now jellyfish is a large area of up-welling water off the southwest coast of Africa from Namibia to South Africa.

This deep cold water contains large amounts of nutrients.

When plankton eat the nutrients, their populations increase massively.

Excess nutrients and dead plankton then fall to the ocean floor.

"A horrible toxic sludge forms, and very few things can live in it except for some bacteria and nematodes," said Professor Braithwaite.

"Somehow the gobies can withstand the toxic environment, but we don't know exactly how they are doing it."

Gobies can cope without oxygen for hours at a time while they rest on the muddy seabed -- but remain alert.

"When we touch them with a rod, they show rapid escape responses," said Braithwaite.

For the goby, the toxic mud is a perfect hiding place as no predators are willing to enter that environment.

"It is a win-win situation where the gobies are using a resource that is usually a dead end in the ocean, the jellyfish," Professor Braithwaite said.

"And they are using the toxic mud as a refuge."

"Together this seems to explain why their population is growing despite the fact that they are now being the main prey species in this unusual ecosystem."

"MDA19 has the potential for alleviating neuropathic pain without producing adverse effects in the central nervous system," said Dr Mohamed Naguib of The University of Texas.

Dr. Naguib investigated cannabinoid receptors to develop new drugs that could treat neuropathic pain.

Neuropathic pain is caused by nerve damage and is common in patients with trauma, diabetes, and other conditions.

Current treatments are generally ineffective.

Rats treated with MDA19 experienced reduced neuropathic pain, with greater effects at higher doses.

At the same time, it did not seem to cause any of the behavioural effects associated with cannabis.

"With functionally selective drugs, it would be possible to separate the desired from the undesired effects of a single molecule through a single receptor," Dr Naguib said.

More research will be needed before MDA19 is ready for testing in humans.

"These elegant studies by Professor Naguib demonstrate remarkable analgesic properties for this synthetic cannabinoid," said Dr Steven L. Shafer of Columbia University.

"Although preliminary, these studies suggest that synthetic cannabinoids may be a significant step forward for patients suffering from neuropathic pain."

The answer to the question in this context is a particular chicken protein.

But there is a further twist as this particular chicken protein turns out to come both first and last.

That neat trick it performs provides new insights into control of crystal growth which is key to eggshell production.

Researchers used a powerful computing technique called metadynamics in conjunction with the UK National Supercomputer in Edinburgh to crack this egg problem.

"Metadynamics extends conventional molecular dynamics (MD) simulations and is particularly good at sampling transitions between disordered and ordered states of matter," said Dr David Quigley of the Department of Physics and Centre for Scientific Computing at the University of Warwick.

Dr Quigley and his colleagues created simulations that showed exactly how the protein bound to amorphous calcium carbonate surface using two clusters of arginine residues, located on two loops of the protein and creating a chemical 'clamp' to nanoparticles of calcium carbonate.

While clamped in this way, the OC-17 encourages the nanoparticles of calcium carbonate to transform into calcite crystallites that form the tiny of nucleus of crystals that can continue to grow on their own.

But they also noticed that this chemical clamp didn’t always work.

The OC-17 just seemed to detach or 'desorbe' from the nanoparticle.

"With the larger nanoparticles we examined we found that the binding sites for this chemical clamp were the same as the smaller nanoparticles but the binding was much weaker," said Professor Mark Rodger of the Department of Chemistry and Centre for Scientific Computing at the University of Warwick.

"In the simulations we performed, the protein never desorbed from the smaller nanoparticle, but always fell off or desorbed from the larger one."

"However in each case, desorption occurred at or after nucleation of calcite."

This elegant process allowing highly efficient recycling of the OC-17 protein.

Effectively it acts as a catalyst, clamping on to calcium carbonate particles to kick-start crystal formation and then dropping off when the crystal nucleus is sufficiently large to grow under its own steam.

This frees up the OC-17 to promote more yet more crystallisation, facilitating the overnight creation of an eggshell.

It is hoped that this new insight will be of great benefit to anyone exploring how to promote and control artificial forms of crystallisation.

"This is the fastest genetic change ever observed in humans," said study leader Professor Rasmus Nielsen of UC Berkeley.

"For such a very strong change, a lot of people would have had to die simply due to the fact that they had the wrong version of a gene."

The mutation found in Tibetans is near a gene called EPAS which codes for a protein involved in sensing oxygen levels and perhaps balancing aerobic and anaerobic metabolism.

Professor Nielsen used computational methods to mine genomic information and discover genetic changes driven by natural selection as humans and animals have adapted to new environments.

Changes in the frequency of DNA mutations proved to be critical.

"You look for rapid evolution in genes because there must be something important about that gene forcing it to change so fast," Professor Nielsen said.

"The new finding is really the first time evolutionary information alone has helped us pinpoint an important function of a gene in humans."

As a result of the mutation, Tibetans have none of the problems facing other ethnicities living at high altitudes -- despite lower oxygen saturation in the blood and lower haemoglobin levels.

Professor Nielsen used genome data produced by the Beijing Genomics Institute to determine the genetic changes associated with these physiological changes.

"We're looking for footprints of past selection to find something functional in our genome," said Professor Nielsen.

The analysis revealed that the common ancestors of Tibetans and Han Chinese split into two populations about 2,750 years ago, with the larger group moving to the Tibetan plateau.

That group eventually shrank, while the low-elevation Han population expanded dramatically.

Today, the Han Chinese are the dominant ethnic group in mainland China.

The Tibetan branch either merged with the people's already occupying the Tibetan plateau, or replaced them.

"We can't distinguish intermixing and replacement," Professor Nielsen said.

"The Han Chinese and Tibetans are as different from one another as if the Han completely replaced the Tibetans about 3,000 years ago."

Although Tibetan and Han Chinese genomes are essentially identical, some 30 genes stood out because of dramatic differences between the Tibetans and the Han.

"We made a list of the genes that changed the most," said Professor Nielsen, "and what was fascinating was that, bing!, at the top of that list was a gene that had changed very strongly, and it was related to the response to oxygen."

"And so ends, perhaps, this claim of mammalian uniqueness," said Professor Dr Harvey J. Karten of UCSD's School of Medicine, lead author of the study.

Mammalian brains were presumed to be more highly evolved and developed than the brains of other animals, in part based upon the distinctive structure of the forebrain and neocortex.

The mammalian neocortex features layers of cells (lamination) connected by radially arrayed columns of other cells.

Early studies of nonmammalian brains had found no similar arrangement, leading to the assumption that neocortical cells and circuits in mammals were unique.

"The belief that cortical micro-circuitry was a unique property of mammalian brains was largely based on the lack of apparent lamination in other species, and the widespread notion that non-mammalian vertebrates were not capable of performing complex cognitive and analytic processing of sensory information like that associated with the neocortex of mammals," Professor Karten said.

"Animals like birds were viewed as lovely automata capable only of stereotyped activity."

But this view created a serious problem for neurobiologists trying to figure out the evolutionary origins of the mammalian cortex -- where did all of that complex circuitry come from and when did it first evolve?

Professor Karten now believes that the answer lies with a common ancestor to both mammals and birds dating back at least 300 million years.

The similarity between mammalian and avian cortices points towards birds as suitable animal models in diverse brain studies.

"Studies indicate that the computational microcircuits underlying complex behaviours are common to many vertebrates," said Professor Karten.

"This work supports the growing recognition of the stability of circuits during evolution and the role of the genome in producing stable patterns."

"The question may now shift from the origins of the mammalian cortex to asking about the changes that occur in the final patterning of the cortex during development."

Image credit: John Went / CC BY-SA 2.0

"The Holy Grail is to be able to build technologies to mimic aspects of human behaviour," said principal investigator Professor Shri Narayanan of the University of Southern California.

It is hoped that the study could lead to the development of technologies to help autistic children, create advanced methods for recognising human speech and visual behaviour, and even quantify humour.

"The applications are limitless given the fundamental nature of the issue we’re addressing -- understanding human behaviour,” said co-investigator Professor Sharon Carnicke.

Drawing upon acting students, Narayanan and Carnicke captured hundreds of motion sequences for analysis and created a database they call the USC CreativeIT Database.

"It’s human data," Professor Narayanan said.

"What can we predict from these measurements?"

"Can we develop a mathematical way of explaining patterns in human behaviour?”

“But ultimately what matters are not the new insights they lead to about human behaviour -- but those that can be translated into useful applications."

"These are ongoing research challenges."

"Even so, it should be remembered that the Standard Model is not a final theory of all phenomena, and is therefore inherently incomplete," said Professor Dmitry Budker of the University of California at Berkeley.

Professor Budker and his colleagues conducted the most rigourous trials yet of a fundamental assumption about how particles behave at the atomic scale.

"We tested one of the major theoretical pillars of quantum field theory, the spin-statistics theorem," said lead investigator Dr Damon English of the University of California at Berkeley.

"Essentially we were asking, are photons really perfect bosons?"

The spin-statistics theorem dictates that all fundamental particles must be classified into one of two types, fermions or bosons.

No two electrons can be in the same quantum state -- but any number of bosons can occupy the same quantum state.

The way to tell them apart is by their spin -– not the classical spin of a whirling top but intrinsic angular momentum, a quantum concept.

"There's a mathematical proof of the spin-statistics theorem, but it's so abstruse you have to be a professional quantum field theorist to understand it," said Professor Budker.

"Every attempt to find a simple explanation has failed, even by scientists as distinguished as Richard Feynman."

"The proof itself is based on assumptions, some explicit, some subtle."

"That's why experimental tests are essential."

The researchers set out to test the theorem by using laser beams to excite the electrons in barium atoms.

For experimenters, barium atoms have particularly convenient two-photon transitions, in which two photons are absorbed simultaneously and together contribute to lifting an atom's electrons to a higher energy state.

"Two-photon transitions aren't rare, but what makes them different from single-photon transitions is that there can be two possible paths to the final excited state -– two paths that differ by the order in which the photons are absorbed during the transition," Dr English said.

"These paths can interfere, destructively or constructively."

"One of the factors that determines whether the interference is constructive or destructive is whether photons are bosons or fermions."

Professor Budker described the studay as 'a true table-top experiment, able to make significant discoveries in particle physics without spending billions of dollars.'

"We keep looking, because experimental tests at ever increasing sensitivity are motivated by the fundamental importance of quantum statistics," he said.

"The spin-statistics connection is one of the most basic assumptions in our understanding of the fundamental laws of nature."

"Our results estimate that around 270 tonnes of potentially contaminated illegal bushmeat is passing unchecked through a single European airport per year, posing a huge potential risk to public health," says lead author Dr Anne-Lise Chaber of the Zoological Society of London (ZSL).

The Central African Republic, Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of Congo were identified as the main sources of bushmeat.

"Our results show that this is a lucrative, organised trade feeding into a luxury market; a 4kg monkey will cost around €100 in France, compared with just €5 in Cameroon," said co-author Dr Marcus Rowcliffe of ZSL.

"Importing bushmeat is relatively easy as customs officials are given no financial incentives to uncover illegal meat imports, compared with the bonuses they're awarded for drug and counterfeit seizures."

"Also, penalties are very low for people caught carrying illegal meat."

The illegal trade of such large quantities of bushmeat also raises serious questions about the importation of pathogens into Europe.

"Surveillance methods need to be more robust and deterrents more severe if we're to have any chance of halting this illegal trade," said co-author Dr Andrew Cunningham of ZSL.

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/http2007/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

"Our results confirm that the effect of exposure to media content is not limited to violence and could have the potential to influence a high spectrum of behaviour," said Nicolas Guéguen of the Université de Bretagne-Sud.

Guéguen and Céline Jacob from the Université de Bretagne-Sud collaborated with Lubomir Lamy from Université de Paris-Sud on the study published in the journal Psychology of Music.

87 females each spent five minutes in a waiting room where one of two carefully-selected tunes played in the background.

They were then moved to a different room where they discussed the difference between two food products with an average-looking young man.

At the end of their conversation, the man asked the girl for her phone number as he wanted to take her out for a drink.

Success or failure was determined by the music playing in the waiting room.

When a 'neutral' song -- 'L'heure du thé' by Vincent Delerm -- was played, only 28 per cent of women gave their number out.

But when 'Je l'aime à mourir' -- a well-known love song by French songwriter Francis Cabrell -- was played, that success rate nearly doubled to 52 per cent.

"The results are interesting for scientists who work on the effect of background music on individuals' behaviour," Guéguen said.

"PAHs are a widespread group of toxic, carcinogenic and mutagenic compounds, but also one of the biggest concerns about oil spills," said Professor Xihou Yin, a research assistant at the Oregon State University College of Pharmacy.

"Some of the most toxic aspects of oil to fish, wildlife and humans are from PAHs."

"They can cause cancer, suppress immune system function, cause reproductive problems, nervous system effects and other health issues."

"This particular strain of bacteria appears to break up and degrade PAHs better than other approaches we have available."

The discovery is strain 'NY3' of Pseudomonas aeruginosa.

It was isolated from a site in Shaanxi Province in China, where soils had been contaminated by oil.

P. aeruginosa is widespread in the environment and can cause serious infections, but usually in people with health problems or compromised immune systems.

However, some strains also have useful properties, including the ability to produce a group of biosurfactants called rhamnolipids.

A surfactant is a type of wetting agent that lowers surface tension between liquids –- but we recognize surfactants more commonly in such products as dishwashing detergent or shampoo.

Biosurfactants are produced by living cells such as bacteria, fungi and yeast, and are generally non-toxic, environmentally benign and biodegradable.

By comparison, chemical surfactants are usually derived from petroleum, are often toxic to health and ecosystems, and resist complete degradation.

Although rhamnolipids have been used for many years, the newly discovered strain, NY3, stands out for some important reasons.

Researchers said in the new study that it has an 'extraordinary capacity' to produce rhamnolipids that could help break down oil, and then degrade some of its most serious toxic compounds, the PAHs.

"The real bottleneck to replacing synthetic chemicals with biosurfactants like rhamnolipid is the high cost of production," Professor Yin said.

"Most of the strains of P. aeruginosa now being used have a low yield of rhamnolipid."

"But strain NY3 has been optimised to produce a very high yield of 12 grams per litre, from initial production levels of 20 milligrams per litre."

More research to further reduce costs and scale up production will be required before strain NY3 is adopted for commercial use.

"Any kindergartener is familiar with this beading phenomenon, which you can demonstrate by stretching a glob of saliva between your thumb and forefinger," said Professor Osman Basaran of Purdue University.

Before the strand of spittle breaks, a string of beads is formed.

"The question is, why does this beading take place only in some fluids containing polymers but not others?" Professor Basaran said.

Purdue postdoctoral researcher Pradeep Bhat and his colleagues have determined the mechanism behind the beading and created a computational model to simulate the phenomenon.

Knowing the answer to this question might enable researchers to design systems that precisely control bead formation, leading to improvements in various technologies such as inkjet printing.

The information also might be used in a system that precisely dispenses the correct dose of medications for individual patients based on simple blood tests.

Saliva and other complex 'viscoelastic' fluids like shaving cream and shampoo contain long chains of molecules called polymers.

In the case of saliva, the polymers are proteins known as mucopolysaccharides.

In comparison, liquids such as water and other so-called "Newtonian" fluids do not form the beads because they lack polymers.

Conventional wisdom has held that all fluids containing polymers should form the beads, but researchers have shown that assumption to be wrong and have demonstrated why.

The researchers tested saliva and a material contained in a strip on the leading edge of disposable razors.

"You moisten the razor strip with water, which causes it to swell, press it against a finger and pull it," said Professor Basaran.

"Unlike saliva, you see strands of liquids formed but no beads."

A key factor in the beading mechanism is fluid inertia, or the tendency of a fluid to keep moving unless acted upon by an external force.

Other major elements are a fluid's viscosity; the time it takes a stretched polymer molecule to 'relax' or snap back to its original shape when stretching is stopped; and the 'capillary time' or how long it would take for the surface of the fluid strand to vibrate if plucked.

"It turns out that the inertia has to be large enough and the relaxation time has to be small enough to form beads," Bhat said.

The researchers discovered bead formation depends on two ratios -- the viscous force compared to inertial force and the relaxation time compared to the capillary time.

Because smearing 'satellite' beads form around droplets produced by an inkjet printer, learning how to control bead formation might be used to improve printing.

Findings also may help to improve an industrial process called electrospinning, used to make a variety of products, and spray coating used in painting.

"The idea is that, if you are operating an inkjet printer, for example, you would be able to control these ratios to prevent the bead formation," Basaran said.

Findings may help to perfect a new type of drug-dispensing technology being developed for 'personalized medicine.'

The technique involves using an inkjet-printing nozzle to deposit drops of medication onto an edible substrate, such as paper or a sugar pill.

The approach might be used by patients with disorders that require precise doses of medication depending on daily blood measurements.

"Patients might be able to do this even at home," said Professor Basaran

"The patient will perform a routine sort of blood analysis, similar to blood-glucose monitoring, and then use this device to 'print' the exact quantity of drug based on the blood measurement, which would be done every day."

L. reuteri naturally occurs in the gut of many mammals and is be found in human breast milk.

Increasing the intake of this bacterium may help alleviate symptoms of a wide range of gut disorders, such as irritable bowel syndrome, inflammatory bowel disease, functional bowel disorders, and constipation.

"Scientifically and evidence-based approaches to nutrition to correct potential bacterial imbalance in the intestine and thereby promote better health and possibly restore health in diseases associated with these imbalances," said Wolfgang Kunze of St. Joseph's Healthcare in Ontario, Canada.

Kunze and his colleagues introduced L. reuteri into isolated pieces of small intestine taken from healthy and previously untreated mice.

The bacterium was then added to a warm salt solution flowing through the intestine.

The pressure caused by natural contractions was measured before, during, and after the addition of L. reuteri.

Relaxation of smooth muscle tissue was compared with the action of the bacterium.

Researchers also tested the electrical activity of single intestinal sensory nerve cells.

"It might not be possible for most of us to get breast milk from the tap, but we can still benefit from some of the life-supporting substances it carries." said Dr Gerald Weissmann, editor-in-chief of the FASEB Journal, the peer-reviewed publishers of the research.

"This research shows that the relationship between humans and microbes can be beneficial for both."

"The Lactobacillus finds a new home, and we're no longer up tight."

Image credit: http://picasaweb.google.com/replytojain / CC BY-SA 3.0

"We have unlocked one of nature's secrets and combined this knowledge with state-of-the-art nanofabrication to mimic the intricate optical designs found in nature,' said Mathias Kolle of Cambridge University.

"Although nature is better at self-assembly than we are, we have the advantage that we can use a wider variety of artificial, custom-made materials to optimise our optical structures."

Kolle collaborated with Professors Ullrich Steiner and Jeremy Baumberg on a study of the Indonesian Peacock or Swallowtail butterfly (Papilio blumei).

The butterfly's wing scales are composed of intricate, microscopic structures that resemble the inside of an egg carton.

Their shape and the fact that they are made up of alternate layers of cuticle and air results in intense colours.

Using several nanofabrication procedures, Kolle and his colleagues made structurally identical copies of the butterfly scales.

These copies produced the same vivid colours as the butterfly's wings.

Being able to mimic these colours has promising applications in security printing.

"These artificial structures could be used to encrypt information in optical signatures on banknotes or other valuable items to protect them against forgery," said Kolle.

"We still need to refine our system but in future we could see structures based on butterflies wings shining from a £10 note or even our passports."

In fact, the butterfly may itself be using its colours as a security measure -- appearing one colour to potential mates but another colour to predators.

"The shiny green patches on this tropical butterfly's wing scales are a stunning example of nature's ingenuity in optical design," Kolle said.

"Seen with the right optical equipment these patches appear bright blue, but with the naked eye they appear green."

"This could explain why the butterfly has evolved this way of producing colour."

"If its eyes see fellow butterflies as bright blue, while predators only see green patches in a green tropical environment, then it can hide from predators at the same time as remaining visible to members of its own species."

"I'm the kind of psychologist who thinks 'what kind of person does (or doesn't do) antisocial things?' when I think about the crimes people commit," said Dr Vincent Egan of the University of Leicester's School of Psychology.

"So I sought to explore the personalities of people who shoplift or fraudulent in commercial settings, compared to those who claim to be honest."

"Most forensic psychological research with criminals focuses on sexual and violent offences, so it was interesting to think about different types of offender."

Dr Egan and a postgraduate student, David Taylor, studied a sample of 114 shoppers aged from 16 to 80 years of age.

The shoppers anonymously completed four questionnaires to measure personality, consumer ethical beliefs, attitudes to shoplifting, and demographics.

Analysis of the data found those lower in emotional stability, higher in extraversion and lower on agreeableness, conscientiousness and intellect were more accepting of unethical consumer behaviour and shoplifting.

"My results suggest dishonest consumer behaviour is narrowly associated with how unpleasant and disorganised you are," Dr Egan said.

"Separate to this, people who commit fraudulent crimes associated with benefiting at the expense of the seller may simply be younger and more outgoing so carried away by the moment."

Of the 114 sampled, 68 had never shoplifted, 30 had shoplifted more than a year ago, and 16 had shoplifted within the past year.

The active shoplifters were significantly younger than the inactive shoplifters and those who had never shoplifted.

The results also found all the currently active shoplifters were male.

"This study looked at ordinary British people visiting a large superstore," said Dr Egan.

"It looked at a variety of ordinary shoppers, not just those who had been convicted of shoplifting."

"We extended thinking by looking at the casual kinds of fraud some people commit."

"By understanding the pathways into these kinds of offences, we can hopefully reduce them in the future."

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jacbt/ / CC BY 2.0

"We are seeing the global ocean store more heat than it gives off," said John Lyman, an oceanographer at NOAA's Joint Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research.

An international team of scientists analysed nine different estimates of heat content in the upper ocean from 1993 to 2008.

They combined these estimates to assess the size and certainty of growing heat storage in the ocean.

"The ocean is the biggest reservoir for heat in the climate system," said Josh Willis, an oceanographer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

"So as the planet warms, we're finding that 80 to 90 per cent of the increased heat ends up in the ocean."

Measurements by an array of autonomous free-floating ocean floats called Argo and earlier devices called expendable bathythermographs (XBTs) demonstrate that ocean heat content has increased over the last 16 years.

But the team notes that there are still uncertainties and some biases.

"The XBT data give us vital information about past changes in the ocean, but they are not as accurate as the more recent Argo data," said Gregory Johnson, an oceanographer at NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory.

"However, our analysis of these data gives us confidence that on average, the ocean has warmed over the past decade and a half, signalling a climate imbalance."

A special supplement to the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease focuses on this topic and presents key findings.

Guest editors Alexandre de Mendonça of the University of Lisbon and Rodrigo A. Cunha of the University of Coimbra assembled a group of international experts to explore the beneficial effects of caffeine on the brain.

"Epidemiological studies first revealed an inverse association between the chronic consumption of caffeine and the incidence of Parkinson's disease," according to Mendonça and Cunha.

"This was paralleled by animal studies of Parkinson's disease showing that caffeine prevented motor deficits as well as neurodegeneration."

"Later a few epidemiological studies showed that the consumption of moderate amounts of caffeine was inversely associated with the cognitive decline associated with ageing as well as the incidence of Alzheimer's disease."

"Again, this was paralleled by animal studies showing that chronic caffeine administration prevented memory deterioration and neurodegeneration in animal models of ageing and of Alzheimer's disease."

Other key findings in the supplement include:

• Multiple beneficial effects of caffeine to normalise brain function and prevent its degeneration
• Caffeine's neuroprotective profile and its ability to reduce the production of Amyloid Beta, the main constituent of plaques in the brains of Alzheimer's disease
• Caffeine as a candidate disease-modifying agent for Alzheimer's disease
• Positive impact of caffeine on cognition and memory performance
• Identification of adenosine A2A receptors as the main target for neuroprotection afforded by caffeine consumption
• Epidemiological studies corroborated by meta-analysis suggesting that caffeine may be protective against Parkinson's disease
• Several methodological issues must be solved before advancing to decisive clinical trials

"The daily follow-up of patients with AD has taught us that improvement of daily living may be a more significant indicator of amelioration than slight improvements in objective measures of memory performance," said Mendonça and Cunha.

"One of the most prevalent complications of AD is depression of mood, and the recent observations that caffeine might be a mood normaliser are of particular interest."

The entire issue has been made available on a no-fee basis at http://iospress.metapress.com/content/t13614762731/.

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/refractedmoments/ / CC BY 2.0

Professor Chris Dwyer of Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering mixed customised snippets of DNA and other molecules to literally billions of identical, tiny, waffle-looking structures.

These nanostructures efficiently self-assemble and when different light-sensitive molecules are added to the mixture, the waffles exhibit programmable properties that can be easily used.

"It's like taking pieces of a puzzle, throwing them in a box and as you shake the box, the pieces gradually find their neighbors to form the puzzle," said Professor Dwyer.

"What we did was to take billions of these puzzle pieces, throwing them together, to form billions of copies of the same puzzle."

Using light to excite these molecules, known as chromophores, simple logic gates can be created -- these circuits are the fundamental building blocks of all computer processors.

"When light is shined on the chromophores, they absorb it, exciting the electrons," Professor Dwyer said.

"The energy released passes to a different type of chromophore nearby that absorbs the energy and then emits light of a different wavelength."

"That difference means this output light can be easily differentiated from the input light, using a detector."

Professor Dwyer is convinced that the new technique will lead to a new generation of computer chips derived from DNA.

"This is the first demonstration of such an active and rapid processing and sensing capacity at the molecular level," he said.

"Conventional technology has reached its physical limits."

"The ability to cheaply produce virtually unlimited supplies of these tiny circuits seems to me to be the next logical step."

Silica makes up two-thirds of the Earth’s crust, and is used to create products ranging from glass and ceramics to computer processors and fibre optic cables.

"Silica is all around us," said doctoral student Kevin Driver of Ohio State University.

"But we still don’t understand everything about it."

"A better understanding of silica on a quantum-mechanical level would be useful to earth science and potentially to industry as well."

"As you might imagine, experiments performed at pressures near those of Earth’s core can be very challenging."

"By using highly accurate quantum mechanical simulations, we can offer reliable insight that goes beyond the scope of the laboratory."

Earth’s interior structure exists in three layers called the crust, mantle, and core.

The outer two layers (the mantle and the crust) are largely made up of silicates -- mineral compounds that contain silicon and oxygen.

But the detailed structure and composition of the deepest parts of the mantle remain unclear.

Even the role that the simplest silicate -- silica -- plays in the planet's mantle is not well understood.

"Say you’re standing on a beach, looking out over the ocean," said Driver.

"The sand under your feet is made of quartz, a form of silica containing one silicon atom surrounded by four oxygen atoms."

"But in millions of years, as the oceanic plate below becomes subducted and sinks beneath the Earth’s crust, the structure of the silica changes dramatically."

Driver, his advisor John Wilkins, and their co-authors used a quantum mechanical method to design computer algorithms that would simulate these silica structures.

They found that the behaviour of the dense, alpha-lead oxide form of silica did not match up with any global seismic signal detected in the lower mantle.

This indicates that the lower mantle is relatively devoid of silica, except perhaps in localised areas where oceanic plates have subducted.

The researchers used a method called quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) that was developed during World War II as part of the effort to create an atomic bomb.

"This work demonstrates both the superb contributions a single graduate student can make and that the quantum Monte Carlo method can compute nearly every property of a mineral over a wide range of pressure and temperatures," said Wilkins.

Image credit: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:CharlesC / CC BY-SA 3.0

"Understanding micro and nano-particle transportation within evaporating liquid droplets has great potential for several technological applications, including nanostructure self-assembly, lithography patterning, particle coating, and biomolecule concentration and separation," said Professor Chih-Ming Ho of the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science.

"However, before we can engineer biosensing devices to do these applications, we need to know the definitive limits of this phenomenon."

"So our research turned to physical chemistry to find the lowest limits of coffee-ring formation."

"If we consider human blood, or saliva, it has a lot of micro and nano-scale molecules or particles that carry important health information," said Dr Tak-Sing Wong of UCLA Engineering's department of mechanical and aerospace engineering.

"If you put this blood or saliva on a surface, and then it dries, these particles will be collected in a very small region in the ring."

"By doing so, we can quantify these biomarkers by various sensing techniques, even if they are very small and in a small amount in the droplets."

As water evaporates from a droplet, particles suspended inside the liquid move to the edges.

Once all the water has evaporated, the particles are concentrated in a ring around the stain left behind.

But if a droplet is small enough, the water will evaporate faster than the particles move.

Instead there will be a relatively uniform concentration in the stain, as the particles have not had enough time to move to the edges.

"It is the competition between the timescale of the evaporation of the droplet and the timescale of the movement of the particles that dictates coffee-ring formation," said Xiaoying Shen, the paper's lead author and a senior microelectronics major at Peking University in China.

"Knowing the minimum size of this so-called coffee ring will guide us in making the smallest biosensors possible," Dr Wong said.

"This means that we can pack thousands, even millions, of small micro-biosensors onto a lab-on-a-chip, allowing one to perform a large number of medical diagnostics on a single chip."

"This may also open the doors to potentially detecting multiple diseases in one sitting."

"There's another important advantage -- this whole process is very natural, it's just evaporation."

"We don't need to use additional devices, such as an electrical power source or other sophisticated instruments to move the particles."

"Evaporation provides a very simple way of concentrating particles and has potential in medical diagnosis."

"For example, researchers at Vanderbilt University were recently awarded a Gates Foundation Research Fund for proposing the use of the coffee-ring phenomenon for malaria detection in developing countries."

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/free-photos/ / CC BY 2.0

"Although rTMS treatment has not yet lived up to early hopes that it might replace more invasive therapies, this study suggests that the treatment may be effective in at least some treatment-resistant patients," said Dr Thomas R. Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).

rTMS treatment accounted for remissions in 14 per cent of antidepressant-resistant patients -- compared to about 5 per cent for the control group who were given a simulated treatment as a placebo.

"This study should help settle the debate about whether rTMS works for depression," said team leader Dr Mark George of the Medical University of South Carolina.

"We can now follow up clues suggesting ways to improve its effectiveness, and hopefully further develop a potential new class of stimulation treatments for other brain disorders."

The study indicated some patients might require as many as 5-6 weeks of daily rTMS treatment.

Most patients who went into remission required 3-5 weeks of treatment.

"For treatment resistant-patients, we found that rTMS is at least as good as current medications or anything else we have available, except ECT," said Dr George.

"Our current antidepressants do not work for many people."

"It has been remarkable to bring a complex protein from an extinct species, such as the mammoth, back to life," said Professor Alan Cooper, Director of the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD) at the University of Adelaide, where the mammoth haemoglobin sequences were determined.

"This is true palaeobiology, as we can study and measure how these animals functioned as if they were alive today."

The project began when Professor Kevin Campbell of the University of Manitoba contacted Professor Cooper to suggest resurrecting mammoth haemoglobin.

"At the time, I thought 'what a great idea' -- but it's never going to work," Professor Cooper said.

"Still, bringing an extinct protein back to life is such an important concept, we've got to try it."

The team transcribed the mammoth haemoglobin DNA sequences into RNA and inserted them into E. Coli bacteria -- the altered organisms manufactured the authentic mammoth protein.

"The resulting haemoglobin molecules are no different than 'going back in time' and taking a blood sample from a real mammoth," said Professor Campbell.

"We've managed to uncover physiological attributes of an animal that hasn't existed for thousands of years."

"Our approach opens the way to studying the biomolecular and physiological characteristics of extinct species, even for features that leave no trace in the fossil record."

"Nearly everyone will experience persistent pain at some point in their lifetime," said Dr Kenneth Hargreaves, a professor of Endodontics at the University of Texas.

"Our findings are truly exciting because they will offer physicians, dentists and patients more options in prescription pain medications."

"In addition, they may help circumvent the problem of addiction and dependency to pain medications, and will have the potential to benefit millions of people who suffer from chronic pain every day."

"Capsaicin is an ingredient in hot chilli peppers and causes pain by activating a receptor called transient potential vanilloid 1 (TRPV1)."

"We started out seeking the answer to the question: 'Why is TRPV1 consistently activated in the body upon injury or painful heat?'"

"We wanted to know how skin cells talk to pain neurones."

"What we found was much more surprising and exciting."

"We have discovered a family of endogenous capsaicin-like molecules that are naturally released during injury, and now we understand how to block these mechanisms with a new class of non-addictive therapies."

Experiments on mice showed that they creates their own natural endogenous capsaicins when they were subjected to pain.

These compounds were later identified as a series of fatty acids called oxidized linoleic acid metabolites (OLAMs) -- metabolises from the linoleic acid that is found naturally in the body.

Dr Hargreaves and his colleages have now developed two new classes of painkillers using drugs that either block the synthesis of OLAMs or antibodies that inactivate them.

With the right drug delivery technology, these new painkillers have the potential to deal with pain at its source -- in contrast to opiates that must travel to the brain to be effective.

Crucially, these novel analgesics have none of the addictive potential of opiates.

"This is a major breakthrough in understanding the mechanisms of pain and how to more effectively treat it," Dr Hargreaves said.

"These data demonstrate, for the first time, that OLAMs constitute a new family of naturally occurring capsaicin-like agents, and may explain the role of these substances in many pain conditions."

"This hypothesis suggests that agents blocking either the production or action of these substances could lead to new therapies and pharmacological interventions for various inflammatory diseases and pain disorders such as arthritis, fibromyalgia and others, including pain associated with cancer."

"Advances in nanotechnology are intimately linked to the existence of high-quality methods and tools for producing nanoscale patterns and objects on surfaces," said Dr Armin Knoll of IBM Research in Zurich.

"With its broad functionality and unique 3D patterning capability, this nanotip-based patterning methodology is a powerful tool for generating very small structures."

The equipment can fit on a tabletop and is cheaper and less complex to use than existing nanofabrication techologies such as electron beam lithography.

The nanotip is attached to a flexible cantilever that scans the surface of the substrate material with the accuracy of one nanometre -- a millionth of a millimetre.

By applying heat and force, the nanotip can remove substrate material based on predefined patterns -- operating like a 'nanomilling' machine with ultra-high precision.

Researchers focused on two types of substrate materials -- a polymer called polyphthalaldehyde and a molecular glass similar to substrates used in conventional nanofabrication techniques known as resists.

"The material was a 'make it or break it' issue," said Jim Hedrick of IBM Research in Almaden.

"We had to find and synthesise materials which form mechanically tough glasses and yet can be easily thermally decomposed into non-reactive volatile units."

The 22 by 11 micrometre world map was created in polyphthalaldehyde, originally developed by IBM Fellow Hiroshi Ito in the 1980s.

Exposed to high temperatures, the components of this chain-like organic molecule unzips and falls into volatile pieces.

A self-amplified reaction causes the molecule to decompose and thus accelerates the patterning process by outpacing the mechanical motion of the nanotip.

Potential applications for the technology range from the fast prototyping of nano-sized devices for computer chips to the production of micron-sized lenses and lens-arrays for the coming generation of optical computing devices.

"The big goal, the whole driving force, besides deep academic curiosity, is to build a quantum computer out of this," said Professor Rui-Rui Du of Rice University.

"The key for that is whether these 5/2 liquids have 'topological' properties that would render them immune to the sorts of quantum perturbations that could cause information degradation in a quantum computer."

Professor du believes that the 5/2 liquids represent a 'non-Abelian' state of matter.

Abelian processes are commutative -- that is to say that the order of operation does not affect the outcome.

In everyday life, washing and drying clothes is a non-commutative operation.

Washing and then drying produces a different result to drying and then washing -- making it analogous to non-Abelian processes.

"It will take a while to fully understand the complete implications of our results, but it is clear that we have nailed down the evidence for 'spin polarisation,' which is one of the two necessary conditions that must be proved to show that the 5/2 liquids are non-Abelian," Professor Du said.

As the 5/2 liquids are non-Abelian, they have a quantum registry where information doesn't change due to external quantum perturbations.

"In a way, they have internal memory of their previous state," said Professor Du.

Before the technology is commercialised, there are hurdles to be overcome.

The research team spent several years building a demagnetisation refrigerator needed to cool 5-millimetre squares of ultra-pure semiconductors to within one-10,000th of a degree of absolute zero.

Gallium arsenide semiconductors were used in the experiments -- the purest available to the researchers.

Before the technology makes an appearance in desktop computers, researchers will have to find a semiconductor that is feasible for use at room temperature.

The cache of tablets including the treaty was unearthed last summer at the site of an ancient temple at Tell Tayinat, located in southeastern Turkey.

Known as the Vassal Treaties of Esarhaddon, the 43 by 28 centimetre tablet contains about 650 lines and is in a very fragile state.

"The tablet is quite spectacular," said Professor Timothy Harrison of the University of Toronto.

"It records a treaty -- or covenant -- between Esarhaddon, King of the Assyrian Empire and a secondary ruler who acknowledged Assyrian power."

"The treaty was confirmed in 672 BC at elaborate ceremonies held in the Assyrian royal city of Nimrud (ancient Kalhu)."

"In the text, the ruler vows to recognize the authority of Esarhaddon's successor, his son Ashurbanipal."

"The treaties were designed to secure Ashurbanipal's accession to the throne and avoid the political crisis that transpired at the start of his father's reign."

"Esarhaddon came to power when his brothers assassinated their father, Sennacherib."

The 7th century BC marked the rise of the Phrygians and other rival powers in highland Anatolia on the north-western frontier of the Assyrian empire.

This was also the time of the divided monarchy of Biblical Israel, as well as increased contact between the Levantine peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean and Egypt, as well as the Greeks.

It is hoped that analysis of the clay tablet will shed a light on the complexities of geopolitical relations in the ancient world.

"It will take months of further work before the document will be fully legible," said Professor Harrison.

"These tablets are like a very complex puzzle, involving hundreds of pieces, some missing."

"It is not just a matter of pulling the tablet out, sitting down and reading."

"We expect to learn much more as we restore and analyse the document."

"Conductive polymers have been around for a long time, but processing them to make something useful degraded their ability to conduct electricity," said Professor Yueh-Lin Loo of Princeton University.

"People didn't understand what was happening."

"We discovered that in making the polymers mouldable, their structures are trapped in a rigid form, which prevented electrical current from travelling through them."

"We have figured out how to avoid this trade-off."

"We can shape the plastics into a useful form while maintaining high conductivity."

Professor Loo and her colleagues developed a technique to relax the structure of the plastics by treating them with an acid after they were processed into the desired form.

They were then able to make a plastic transistor by printing the plastic onto a surface -- a fast and cheap method similar to the way an ink-jet printer produces a pattern on a piece of paper.

"Being able to essentially paint on electronics is a big deal," Professor Loo said.

"You could distribute the plastics in cartridges the way printer ink is sold, and you wouldn't need exotic machines to print the patterns."

Conductive polymers could represent a low-cost alternative to indium tin oxide (ITO), an expensive conducting material currently used in solar panels.

Currently, the electricity generated by plastic solar cells is collected by a transparent metal conductor made of ITO.

This conductor must be transparent so that sunlight can pass through it to the materials in solar cells that absorb the light energy.

"The cost of indium tin oxide is skyrocketing," said Professor Loo.

"To bring down the costs of plastic solar cells, we need to find a replacement for ITO."

"Our conducting plastics allow sunlight to pass through them, making them a viable alternative."

The researchers are also investigating the use of plastics as cheap diagnostic tools in medicine.

For example, there are plastics that turn from yellow to green when exposed to nitric oxide -- a chemical compound produced during ear infections in children.

"You wouldn't need any fancy machines or lab equipment to diagnose an infection," Professor Loo said.

"All you would need is your eyes to see the colour change in the plastics."

"I am interested in the ways in which people consume music -- what are they doing with it?" said Dr Marsh.

"Walking through Victoria Park in Leicester you see lots of people listening to their iPods seemingly caught up in their own private worlds."

"People devote hours and hours to music, often having daily or weekly listening rituals that they follow."

"People are starting to identify ‘canons’ of material from popular culture: resources which are worth returning to, again and again, for enjoyment, yes, but also to help people ‘think things through’."

"They are also locating ‘authoritative communities’ -- sometimes virtual communities: groups of people whose views they trust, who gather around music, bands, TV programmes or film-sites."

"Not just to talk about music, TV or film, but to reflect on how their listening and viewing habits inform their living and help them develop their philosophical, religious, political or ethical commitments."

The music listening survey is also being used across America, and the conclusions will be used to write a book-length study later this year.

Dr Marsh will deliver a lecture on on his research entitled ‘Adventures in Affective Space: The Reconstruction of Piety in an Age of Entertainment’ on Friday 7 May 2010 at the University of Leicester.

"We're very excited about this technology that may pave the way for a new process for carbon dioxide capture," said Dr Robert Perry of GE Global Research.

Amino silicones are used to condition damaged or hydrophilic hair -- as opposed to regular silicone which is hydrophobic and fails to adhere.

They are also used in fabric softeners and flexible high-temperature plastics.

Dr Perry and his colleagues have established that amino silicones could provide a less expensive and more efficient alternative to current CO2 scrubbers.

Lab tests show that amino silicones scrub more than 90 percent of the CO2 from simulated flue gases.

Now the imperative is to develop a commercially viable solution that removes and sequesters the CO2 from the amino silicones.

This would allow the amino silicones to be continuously recycled -- making the system even more cost-effective.

"The development of a low-cost solution for CO2 capture would go a long way in helping to address our clean energy goals," said Dr Perry.

"In the future, the gases that come out of power-plant smokestacks will be virtually free of carbon dioxide emissions."

"We are rapidly entering a time when nearly anyone can have his or her genome sequenced," said Professor Dr Michael Snyder, chair of genetics at Stanford.

"However, the bulk of the differences among individuals are not found in the genes themselves, but in regions we know relatively little about."

"Now we see that these differences profoundly impact protein binding and gene expression."

Genes vary by only about 0.025 per cent across all humans.

Scientists have spent decades trying to understand how these tiny differences affect our development.

Yet non-coding regions of the genome -- which account for approximately 98 per cent of our DNA -- vary in their sequence by 1 to 4 per cent.

Professor Snyder and his colleagues have found that unique changes among individuals in the sequence of DNA affect the ability of transcription factors to bind to the regions that control gene expression.

As a result, the subsequent expression of nearby genes can vary significantly.

"People have done a lot of work over the years to characterise differences in gene expression among individuals," said Professor Snyder.

"We're the first to look at differences in transcription-factor binding from person to person."

"These binding regions or chunks vary among individuals and they have a profound impact on gene expression."

Two individual studies were conducted that compared the binding patterns of transcription factors in chimpanzees and yeast respectively.

"We conducted the two studies in parallel and found the same thing," Professor Snyder said.

"Many of the binding sites differed."

"When we mapped the areas of difference, we found that they were associated with key regulators of variation in the population."

"Together these two studies tell us a lot about the so-called regulatory code that controls variation among individuals."

RFID tags are already used in smart cards such as the Oyster ticket used to travel on public transport in London.

They have also been incorporated into the new biometric passports introduced recently by the UK government.

But these devices are based on silicon and are too expensive for use in everyday applications such as tagging items in a supermarket.

Now researchers at Rice University in the US have colloborated with colleagues at Sunchon National University in Korea to create RFID tags that can be printed onto a roll of plastic.

Printable RFID tags are practical because they're passive in nature -- they power up when hit by radio waves at the right frequency and return the information they contain.

"If there's no power source, there's no lifetime limit," said Professor James Tour of Rice University.

"When they receive the RF signal, they emit."

Before the tags are ready of use outside the lab, researchers must find a way to reduce the size of the tags by two-thirds to match existing bar codes.

There are also issues around the range of the tags.

"Right now, the emitter has to be pretty close to the tags, but it's getting farther all the time," Professor Tour said.

"The practical distance to have it ring up all the items in your shopping cart is a metre."

"But the ultimate would be to signal and get immediate response back from every item in your store -- what's on the shelves, their dates, everything."

"At 300 meters, you're set -- you have real-time information on every item in a warehouse."

"If something falls behind a shelf, you know about it."

"If a product is about to expire, you know to move it to the front -- or to the bargain bin."

"In the 16th century, naming men before women became the acceptable word-order to use because of the thinking that men were the worthier sex," said psychologist Dr Peter Hegarty of the University of Surrey.

"This grammar has continued with 'Mr and Mrs', 'his and hers' and the names of romantic couples like Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet."

"While the original sexist ideas behind this grammar are no longer accepted, we wanted to investigate whether the sexist habit of male names coming before female names still holds true and the psychological reasons why this might be."

Using 10 popular British male and female names and another 10 popular American boys and girls names, the team searched the web using each of the possible male-female name pairs as search terms.

For British name pairs, the male-first name pairings accounted for 79 per cent of the mentions -- male-first mentions were 70 per cent for the Americans.

"These results were found to be statistically significant, and support the idea that gender stereotypes still affect the written language," Dr Hegarty said.

"It has been argued that the male-first effect isn't down to sexism but that it is due to phonological attributes of male names, or because male names come more readily to mind as they are popular and familiar."

"We therefore carried out further studies to investigate whether the male-first finding was a gender stereotyping effect."

A sample group of 121 people were asked to imagine a heterosexual couple who were either 'quite traditional and who conform strictly to gender scripts about how the two genders should behave' or 'non-traditional who deviate radically'.

They were then asked to write down five possible name-combinations for this hypothetical couple.

Participants named the imagined 'traditional couples' men-first more often -- but this effect was not seen in the naming of 'non-traditional' couples.

In a third study, 86 people were asked to write down names of an imagined lesbian or gay couple.

They were then asked to assign attributes such as annual earnings, interest in fashion, interest in sport and physical attributes to each individual.

Participants assigned significantly more of the masculine attributes and fewer of the feminine attributes to the person they named first.

"The results of our studies suggest that people tend to put men, or male qualities, before women," said Dr Hegarty.

"As this is a remnant of the sexist grammar of the 16th century, it would seem that psychologically, we are still sexist in writing."

But Dr Hegarty cautions that the effect does not always apply when dealing with couples that we know well:

"When people address greeting cards to couples, for example, they often put the person that they know best first, whether female or male."

"You've heard of the French paradox?" said lead author Professor Magali Delmas of the University of California in Los Angeles.

"Well, this is the American version."

"You'd expect anything with an eco-label to command a higher price, but that's just not the case with California wine."

While the general public miss out on good quality wine, savvy oenophiles have an opportunity to save money.

"Wine made with organic grapes -- especially if it has an eco-label -- is a really good deal," said study co-author Laura E. Grant, a Ph.D. candidate in environmental science and management at the University of California in Santa Barbara.

"For the price of conventional wine, you get a significantly better quality wine."

"Wine made with organically grown grapes is higher quality," Professor Delmas added.

"Growers have to devote more time and attention and take better care of organically certified vines than conventional vines, and our results show that these efforts are apparent in the product."

The study found that the 'made from organically grown grapes' label not only negated the price premium for using certified grapes but actually drove prices 7 per cent below those for conventionally produced wines.

Only one-third of vintners using organically certified grapes actually advertised the fact on wine labels.

"Producers of two-thirds of these wines must suspect that consumers, for whatever reason, wouldn't appreciate the use of organically grown grapes," said Professor Delmas.

"Otherwise, why would they refrain from drawing attention to this benefit on their labels?"

One theory is that consumers believe that wines made with organic grapes lack preservatives -- a result of confusion with 'organic wines' that do not contain sulphites.

But certified wines made with organic grapes are allowed to use sulphites as a preservative.

"Organic wine earned its bad reputation in the '70s and '80s," Grant said.

"Considered 'hippie wine,' it tended to turn to vinegar more quickly than non-organic wine. This negative association still lingers."

Today's organic wines are still susceptible to taint as a result of the lack of added preservatives.

"Without added sulphites, the wine turns into vinegar after a while, and you're likely to lose out on the opportunity for your wine to mature into something considerably richer than when purchased, which is the promise of fine wine," Professor Delmas said.

"So while no-sulphites-added is fine for white wines such as Chardonnay that you usually drink 'young,' it is not good for a red wine like a Cabernet Sauvignon that you want to keep to drink in a year or two."

Surprisingly, green consumers are more likely to be motivated by personal benefit than a desire to protect the environment.

"Consumers buy organically grown food because they think it is going to improve their health," said Professor Delmas.

"That motivation doesn't go a long way with wine."

"If consumers want to drink something healthy, they'll reach for wheat grass, not an alcoholic beverage."

Professor Delmas hopes that consumers start to get the message that wine produced with organic grapes tastes better.

"Vintners and regulators really need to communicate better what wine with organically grown grapes means and the potential impact on quality," she said.

"I don't think they've done that, and I think it's too bad."

"It's a real missed opportunity."

A richly dense pattern of spikes -- each representing the emission of light from a specific molecule -- was found in the HIFI spectrum.

Among the molecules identified were those of water, carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, methanol, dimethyl ether, hydrogen cyanide, sulphur oxide, sulphur dioxide and their isotope analogues.

Researchers anticipate that new organic molecules will also be identified in the future.

"This HIFI spectrum, and the many more to come, will provide a virtual treasure trove of information regarding the overall chemical inventory and on how organics form in a region of active star formation," said Edwin Bergin of the University of Michigan and principal investigator of the HEXOS Key Programme on Herschel.

"It harbours the promise of a deep understanding of the chemistry of space once we have the full spectral surveys available."

HIFI was conceived to open new wavelength ranges for high resolution mapping -- especially when inaccessible to ground-based telescopes.

"It is astonishing to see how well HIFI works," said Frank Helmich, HIFI principal investigator at the SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research.

"We obtained this spectrum in a few hours and it already beats any other spectrum, at any other wavelength, ever taken of Orion."

"Organics are everywhere in this spectrum, even at the lowest levels, which hints at the fidelity of HIFI."

"The development of HIFI took eight years but it was really worth waiting for."

Identification of the many features visible in the Orion spectrum was dependent on tools like the Cologne Database of Molecular Spectroscopy -- a collection of spectroscopic data covering several hundred molecular species.

“The high spectral resolution of HIFI shows the breath-taking richness of molecular species, which are present, despite of the hostile environment, in the stellar nurseries and sites for planet formation”, said Jürgen Stutzki, HIFI-co-principal investigator at the University of Cologne.

"Some of the stars and star clusters you see when you look into space at night are aliens from another galaxy, just not the green-skinned type you find in a Hollywood movie," said Dr Terry Bridges, an astronomer at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada.

"These ‘alien’ star clusters have made their way into our galaxy over the last few billion years."

Astronomers previously suspected that some star clusters -- which contain from 100,000 to a million stars each -- were foreign to our galaxy.

But identifying those star clusters with origins in other galaxies was a difficult task.

Dr Bridges collaborated with Duncan Forbes of Swinburne University of Technology in Australia on solving this problem.

They examined old star clusters within the Milky Way galaxy using data from the Hubble Space Telescope.

This yielded the largest ever high-quality database to record the age and chemical properties of each of these clusters.

"We looked at all the data we could find," Dr Bridges said.

"The best data are from the Hubble Telescope because it has the best imaging."

"We looked at the ages and the amounts of heavy elements in these clusters, which can be measured from their stars."

One of the key findings of the study is that the Milky Way may have swallowed-up more dwarf galaxies than was previously thought.

These ‘mini’ galaxies of up to 100 million stars sit within our larger Milky Way.

The study suggests that many 'invading' star clusters came from dwarf galaxies -- which would mean that that the Milky Way may have far more dwarf galaxies than previously suspected.

"I think that it's important to really question this knee-jerk reaction that we are our own best experts," said Professor Simine Vazire of Washington University.

"Personality is not who you think you are, it's who you are."

"Some people think by definition that we are the experts on our personality because we get to write the story, but personality is not the story -- it's the reality."

"So, you do get to write your own story about how you think you are, and what you tell people about yourself, but there still is reality out there, and, guess what?"

"Other people are going to see the reality, regardless of what story you believe."

Evidence of personality traits are obvious in the choices we make -- the clothes we choose to wear, how we decorate a bedroom, the content posted on a social networking site, and so on.

"Everything you touch you leave a mark of your personality," Professor Vazire said.

"You leave traces unintentionally."

"You give off hints of your personality that you don't even see yourself."

She used a battery of tests on 165 volunteers and discovered that while people were good at assessing their own internal traits such as anxiety, other people were better at observing external traits such as extroversion.

“You probably know pretty well your anxiety level, whereas others might not be in the position to judge that because, after all, you can mask your inner feelings,” said Professor Vazire.

“Others, though, are often better than the self in things that deal with overt behaviour.”

Professor Vazire believes that desirable traits such as intelligence, attractiveness, and creativity are hard for the self to judge objectively.

"There is so much at stake, meaning your life is going to be so much different if you are intelligent or not intelligent, attractive or not," she said.

"Everybody wants to be seen as intelligent and attractive, but these desirable traits we’re not going to judge accurately in ourselves."

We are better at judging friends’ intelligence than our own 'because it’s not that threatening to us to admit that our friends aren’t brilliant, but it’s more threatening to admit to ourselves that we’re not brilliant.'

A classic example of this is how we perceive ourselves in the mirror.

"We look in the mirror all the time, yet that's not the same as looking at a photo of someone else," Professor Vazire said.

"If we spent as much time looking at photos of others as we do ourselves, we'd form a much more confident and clear impression of the other's attractiveness than we would have of our own."

"Yet after looking in the mirror for five minutes we're still left wondering, 'Am I attractive or not?'"

"And still have no clue.'

"And it's not the case that we all assume that we're beautiful, right?"

For some personality traits, she says we miss the point if we look at thoughts and feelings and ignore the behaviour.

Bullies, for example, have thoughts and feelings that tell them they’re insecure and want to be liked and admired, which is not a horrible, nasty notion.

But they cannot see their behaviour as nasty and horrible, though, because their thoughts obscure their actions.

Similarly, if you think that you are warm and friendly, but friends and family say that you don't come across that way in reality, you might pay more attention to your behaviours.

"I believe I've presented evidence that should make people think twice," said Professor Vazire.

"On average, the people who know you best know you as well as you know yourself, no better, no worse than you."

'More importantly, there are things that both you know that they don't know, and things that they know that you don't know, and those lead to very interesting experiences and disagreements."

The study look at a type of malware known as a 'rootkits.'

Unlike viruses, rootkits attack the heart of a computer’s software -- its operating system.

They can only be detected from outside a compromised operating system with a specialised tool known as a virtual machine monitor, which can examine every system operation and data structure.

“Smart phones are essentially becoming regular computers,” said Professor Vinod Ganapathy of Rutgers’ School of Arts and Sciences.

“They run the same class of operating systems as desktop and laptop computers, so they are just as vulnerable to attack by malicious software, or ‘malware.’”

The researchers deliberately infected smartphones with rootkits to demonstrate how an attack on a smartphone could be used to eavesdrop on a user, track the movements of the owner via GPS, or rapidly drain the smartphone's battery to render it useless.

These actions could happen without the owner being aware of what happened or what caused them.

But the researchers point out that they have not employed vulnerabilities in current smartphones -- they deliberately infected the devices in order to assess the potential threat.

“What we’re doing today is raising a warning flag,” study co-author Professor Liviu Iftode said.

“We’re showing that people with general computer proficiency can create rootkit malware for smart phones."

"The next step is to work on defences.”

"There’s nothing in biology in this system -- no proteins, no cells, no biological matter," said molecular biologist Professor Gerald Joyce of the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego.

"We just provide them with the building blocks."

Professor Joyce worked with PhD student Tracey Lincoln on taking naturally occuring RNA enzymes known as ribozymes and placing them in a growth medium.

They were heated and allowed to replicate until they had exhausted their fuel -- a random subset was extracted and put them in a new medium.

The ribozymes then competed with each other to consume as much of the medium as possible.

The more successful ribozymes came to dominate the culture and grew in complexity -- blindly finding solutions that made them more successful.

"They’re just molecules, so they do what they do until they run out of substrate," said Joyce.

"And this will go for ever -- it’s an immortal molecule, if you like."

"The key thing is it replicates itself, and passes information from parent to progeny down the line."

"There’s roughly 30 bits of information passed."

"Some functions are more fit than others, and those that are more fit ‘breed’ more, and are perpetuated more efficiently, and so it goes Darwinian."

Although the ribozymes have some characteristics of life, they still do not constitute a truly living system.

The challenge for researchers now is to create genetic systems that have all the qualities of life -- but without use of existing biological components.

"The aim is to create systems that have inventive capabilities, that can develop novel solutions to challenges posed by the environment."

"What we do have is a self-sustained chemical system that undergoes Darwinian evolution."

"They are synthetic genetic systems, and they are evolving."

"But they’re not living because they don’t yet show the capacity to invent a whole cloth of functions."

"The idea is to given them enough information wherewithal so they can start inventing their own solutions rather than just optimising existing solutions."

"This technology could eventually lead to wearable 'smart clothes' that can power hand-held electronics through ordinary body movements," said Professor Liwei Lin of the University of California in Berkeley, head of the international research team that developed the fibre nanogenerators.

"And because the nanofibres are so small, we could weave them right into clothes with no perceptible change in comfort for the user."

The flexible nanofibres are made from organic polyvinylidene fluoride, or PVDF, making them relatively easy and cheap to manufacture.

Previous efforts have focused on nanogenerators out of inorganic semiconducting materials, such as zinc oxide or barium titanate.

"Inorganic nanogenerators -- in contrast to the organic nanogenerators we created -- are more brittle and harder to grow in significant quantities," Professor Lin said.

Although the exact ratio of movement to power has yet to be determined, it appears that more vigourous movements result in more electricity generated.

"Surprisingly, the energy efficiency ratings of the nanofibres are much greater than the 0.5 to 4 per cent achieved in typical power generators made from experimental piezoelectric PVDF thin films, and the 6.8 per cent in nanogenerators made from zinc oxide fine wires," said the study's lead author, Chieh Chang.

"We think the efficiency likely could be raised further," said Professor Lin.

"For our preliminary results, we see a trend that the smaller the fibre we have, the better the energy efficiency."

"We don't know what the limit is."

"Our heel touches the ground at the start of each step, " said Professor David Carrier of the University of Utah, senior author of the new study.

"In most mammals, the heel remains elevated during walking and running."

"Most mammals -- dogs, cats, raccoons -- walk and run around on the balls of their feet."

'Ungulates like horses and deer run and walk on their tiptoes." he adds.

"Few species land on their heel -- bears and humans and other great apes [such as] chimps, gorillas, orang-utans."

"Our study shows that the heel-down posture increases the economy of walking but not the economy of running."

The major findings of the study include:

• "The activity of the major muscles of the ankle, knee, hip and back all increase if you walk on the balls of your feet or your toes as opposed to landing on your heels," said Professor Carrier. "That tells us the muscles increase the amount of work they are producing if you walk on the balls of your feet."
• "When we walk on the balls of our feet, we take shorter, more frequent strides," said Professor Carrier. "But this did not make walking less economical." Putting the heel down first and pivoting onto the ball of the foot makes the stride longer because the full length of the foot is added to the length of the step. But that has no effect on energy use.
• The researchers wondered if stepping first on the balls of the feet took more energy than walking heel-first because people are less stable on their toes or balls of the feet. But increased stability did not explain why heel-first walking uses less energy.
• Stepping heel-first reduced the up-and-down motion of the body's center of mass during walking and required less work by the hips, knees and ankles. Stepping first onto the balls of the feet slows the body more and requires more re-acceleration.
• Heels-first steps also made walking more economical by increasing the transfer of movement or "kinetic" energy to stored or "potential" energy and back again. As a person starts to step forward and downward, stored energy is changed to motion or kinetic energy. Then, as weight shifts onto the foot and the person moved forward and upward, their speed slows down, so the kinetic energy of motion is converted back into stored or potential energy. The study found that stepping first onto the balls of the feet made this energy exchange less efficient that walking heels-first.
• Heel-first walking also reduced the "ground reaction force moment" at the ankle. That means stepping first onto the ball of the foot "decreases the leverage, decreases the mechanical advantage" compared with walking heel-first, Professor Carrier said.

But if heel-first walking is so economical, why do so many animals walk other ways?

"They are adapted for running," said Professor Carrier.

"They've compromised their economy of walking for the economy of running."

"We are not efficient runners."

"In fact, we consume more energy to run than the typical mammal our size."

"But we are exceptionally economical walkers."

"This study suggests that one of the things that may explain such economy is the unusual structure of our foot."

"The whole foot contacts the ground when we walk."

"We have a big heel."

"Our big toe is as long as our other toes and is much more robust."

"Our big toe also is parallel to and right next to the second toe."

"These features are distinct among apes, and provide the mechanical basis for economical walking."

"No other primate or mammal could fit into human shoes."

47.2 per cent of households with a cat had at least one person educated to degree level, while the figure was 38.4 per cent for households with dogs.

"We don't know why there is this discrepancy," said Dr Jane Murray, a lecturer in feline epidemiology at Bristol University.

The study, published in the Veterinary Record by Dr Murray and her colleagues, aimed to estimate the total number of UK domestic cats and dogs -- as well as identifying the characteristics of their owners.

A telephone survey of households in 2007 randomly selected from the electoral roll revealed that cats and dogs were owned by 26 per cent and 31 per cent of households respectively.

This data was then applied to data from the 2001 UK census -- yielding an estimate of 10.3 million cats and 10.5 million dogs living domestically.

The last peer-reviewed study, dating back to 1989, suggested there were 6.2 millon cats and 6.4 million dogs.

But it is the anomalous difference in degree education between cat and dog owners that has researchers puzzled.

"We did look at average household income but that wasn't significant," Dr Murray said.

"Our best guess is that it's to do with working hours and perhaps commuting to work, meaning people have a less suitable lifestyle for a dog."

"It's really just a hunch though."

The researchers used new data on black holes to calculate entropy -- the phenomenon where various types of energy are permanently converted to thermal energy.

The conclusion of entropy may be 'heat death' where all matter and energy in the universe eventually becomes thermal energy -- with no hope of reversing the process.

"We considered all contributions to the entropy of the observable universe -- stars, star light, the cosmic microwave background," said Chas Egan, a PhD student at the Australian National University's (ANU) Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

"We even made an estimate of the entropy of dark matter."

"But it’s the entropy of super-massive black holes that dominates the entropy of the universe."

"When we used the new data on the number and size of super-massive black holes, we found that the entropy of the observable universe is about 30 times larger than previous calculations."

"Contrary to common opinion, the maintenance of all the complicated structures we see around us -- galaxies, stars, hurricanes and kangaroos -- have the net effect of increasing the disorder and entropy of the universe" said Dr Charley Lineweaver, co-ordinator of ANU’s Planetary Science Institute.

"But to be fair, their contributions are negligible compared to the entropy of super-massive black holes."

These findings have important implications for living systems on Earth and beyond.

"The universe started out in a low entropy state and, in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics, the entropy has been increasing ever since," Egan said.

"This is important because the amount of energy available to life in the universe, including terrestrial life, depends on the entropy of the universe."

"We’d like to know how much energy will be available to life forms anywhere in the universe, and where this energy is."

"The first step in this procedure is to determine the entropy of the universe."

"That is what we did."

The next phase of their research is to determine the point of maximum entropy to determine when we can expect heat death in the universe.

But there is one small reason to hope that the universe may not be ultimately doomed.

Physicist Erwin Schrödinger of Schrödinger's Cat fame helped to pioneer the mathematical analysis of living systems in his seminal 1944 book 'What is Life?'.

He believed that life itself was 'negative entropy' and that this quality was observable in living organisms.

Perhaps somewhere out there, extraterrestrial scientists are even now developing strategies to prevent the end of the universe.

In Europe, farming spread from the Fertile Crescent -- the region extending from the eastern Mediterranean coast to the Persian Gulf and including the Tigris and Euphrates valleys.

But was the westerly spread of agriculture from the Near East driven by actual migration or the transfer of new ideas to indigenous hunter-gatherers?

"We focused on the commonest Y-chromosome lineage in Europe, carried by about 110 million men –- it follows a gradient from south-east to north-west, reaching almost 100% frequency in Ireland," said study leader Professor Mark Jobling of Leicester University.

"We looked at how the lineage is distributed, how diverse it is in different parts of Europe, and how old it is."

"In total, this means that more than 80% of European Y-chromosomes descend from incoming farmers," said Dr Patricia Balaresque, lead author of the study at Leicester University.

"In contrast, most maternal genetic lineages seem to descend from hunter-gatherers."

"To us, this suggests a reproductive advantage for farming males over indigenous hunter-gatherer males during the switch from hunting and gathering, to farming -– maybe, back then, it was just sexier to be a farmer."

Bacterial cells contain a number of receptors and each one affects a particular behaviour or trait -- for example, where to move or even to become more virulent.

What has remained unknow is how individual receptors, by sensing their environment, directly affect a bacterium's behaviour and ability to adapt to its environment.

Gladys Alexandre -- an associate professor of biochemistry, cellular and molecular biology at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville -- is one of the first to isolate and study a receptor in this way.

Biologist normally study the common bacteria Escherichia coli as the model for bacteria's ability to move actively and independently.

But Professor Alexandre decided to look at the more complex soil bacterium, Azospirillum brasilense.

"As bacteria's ability to make decisions goes, E. coli is kind of dumb, which makes it easy for researchers to study sensing and information processing -- essentially, decision making -- in this bacterium," she said.

A. brasilense has 48 receptors versus as opposed to the five receptors generally found in E. coli.

Professor Alexandre and her colleagues homed in on a receptor that they suspected was involved in nitrogen fixing -- the biological process that turns atmospheric nitrogen gas into ammonium, a process that makes it available for metabolisation by other organisms.

But the exact biological processes involved were still unclear -- so Professor Alexandre turned to a colleague using the latest computer-based techniques for analysing genetic structures.

Igor Jouline of Oak Ridge National Laboratory was able to generate a model of the receptor's structure and compared it to other known structures on a nearly atom-by-atom basis.

This enabled them to predict which one of the more than 100 amino acids in the sensory part of the receptor is responsible for sensing the precise oxygen concentration that the bacterium needs for nitrogen fixing.

Using conventional genetic techniques, this would have taken a significant amount of time -- but using computers made the process much quicker.

"Partnering with Igor provided us great insight," said Professor Alexandre.

"We would not have been able to fully understand how this receptor works without him."

"We see now that bacteria are, in their way, big thinkers, and by knowing how they 'feel' about the environment around them, we can look at new and different ways to work with them."

"Animals that are completely asexual are relatively rare, which makes this is a very interesting ant," says Christian Rabeling, an ecology, evolution and behaviour graduate student at The University of Texas at Austin.

"Asexual species don't mix their genes through recombination, so you expect harmful mutations to accumulate over time and for the species to go extinct more quickly than others."

"They don't generally persist for very long over evolutionary time."

Mycocepurus smithii is a common species of fungus-gardening ants, which is widely distributed throughout Latin America and relies on a symbiotic fungus for food.

Previous studies of the ants pointed toward the ants being completely asexual.

Anna Himler, a graduate student at The University of Texas at Austin, showed that the ants reproduced in the lab without males -- no amount of stress induced the production of males.

Formerly it was thought that specimens of male ants collected in Brazil in the 1960s were males of M. smithii.

Rabeling analysed these samples and determined that the males were in fact of the species Mycocepurus obsoletus, a closely related fungus-gardening ant that does reproduce sexually.

He also dissected reproducing M. smithii queens from Brazil -- their sperm storage organs were completely empty.

Rabeling and his colleagues estimate the ants could have first evolved within the last one to two million years -- a very young species given that the fungus-farming ants evolved 50 million years ago.

He is now using DNA analysis to study the evolution of the fungus-gardening ants.

It is hoped that this will determine a more accurate date for the change in M. smithii that led to them dispensing with males altogether.

Initial funding of US$2 million is being provided by Darpa, the defence research agency responsible for the technology behind the Internet.

Darpa have christened the programme 'Transformer' -- the intended result being a transportation vehicle that can drive and fly but also carry up to four people.

The stated intention of the Transformer initiative is to enable soldiers to avoid water, difficult terrain, and road obstructions as well as IED and ambush threats.

Whilst US$2 million may seem like a derisory amount, it is hoped that more funding will become available as interest develops in the initiative.

To that end, Darpa are hosting a workshop day this month for prospective contractors.

Darpa have not disclosed if the programme has been named for the Transformers line of toys -- but the similarity has been noticed by some.

"It would only make sense to dub the first prototype vehicle Optimus Prime when -- and if -- Darpa gets there," said Mike Lysaght, correspondent for Edmunds Inside Line.

Previous thinking on Darwinian evolution has assumed that changes in nucleic acid sequences, whether that is DNA or RNA, brings about the mutations that enable evolutionary variation.

But prions noticably lacking in nucleic acid still evolve in the same way as other infectious micro-organisms.

"On the face of it, you have exactly the same process of mutation and adaptive change in prions as you see in viruses," said study leader Dr Charles Weissmann, head of The Scripps Institute 's Department of Infectology in Florida.

"This means that this pattern of Darwinian evolution appears to be universally active."

"In viruses, mutation is linked to changes in nucleic acid sequence that leads to resistance."

"Now, this adaptability has moved one level down -- to prions and protein folding -- and it's clear that you do not need nucleic acid for the process of evolution."

"It was generally thought that once cellular prion protein was converted into the abnormal form, there was no further change."

"But there have been hints that something was happening."

"When you transmit prions from sheep to mice, they become more virulent over time."

"Now we know that the abnormal prions replicate, and create variants, perhaps at a low level initially."

'But once they are transferred to a new host, natural selection will eventually choose the more virulent and aggressive variants."

Although prion-related diseases are currently untreatable, the findings may indicate new avenues of research.

Future therapies may try to limit the production of the naturally occuring prions before they can mutate rather than try to target the already abnormal prions.

"It will likely be very difficult to inhibit the production of a specific natural protein pharmacologically," said Dr Weissmann said.

"You may end up interfering with some other critical physiological process, but nonetheless, finding a way to inhibit the production of normal prion protein is a project currently being pursued in collaboration with Scripps Florida Professor Corinne Lasmezas in our department."

"Indigenous Australians tell lots of stories about stars falling out of the sky with a noise like thunder -- and one of the stories gave a location in the Northern Territory," said Macquarie University PhD candidate Duane Hamacher, a researcher of Aboriginal astronomy at the Department of Indigenous Studies.

"I also decided to look at known impact craters in Australia and see if they had associated dreaming stories that attributed their origins to cosmic impacts -- and some did."

Hamacher managed to locate a bowl-shaped crater at Palm Valley, around 130 miles south-west of Alice Springs.

"I searched for it on Google Earth, but when I really found something looking like a crater I couldn't believe it."

"I was very hesitant with excitement as I thought I would look like an idiot if it was just something simple -- but it wasn't."

"It was a crater."

Geological investigation of the crater has yielded physical evidence that strongly indicates its origins in a meteorite impact.

"We found shocked quartz, which is only produced by a substantial impact and its presence in the rock samples and the morphology of the structure are the major indicators that Palm Valley is a crater," said Hamacher.

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"There is no other way to explain the structure's morphology than as a cosmic impact."

"It couldn't have been erosion and there is no volcanic activity in the area."

Although some stories could be explained as simple eyewitness accounts, many meteorite impacts occurred long before known history -- indicating that Aboriginal astronomy may be more sophisticated than hitherto suspected.

"Lots of Aboriginal Dreamtime stories are associated with craters, meteorites and cosmic impacts and although some craters are millions of years old and people would not have been able to witness the impact, it seems as if traditional dreaming stories know about the crater's origin," Hamacher said.

"We found stories with descriptions of cosmic impacts and meteorite falls related to places in Arnhem Land -- we assume there are more meteorite craters out there and science doesn't even know about their existence yet."

"Tremors seem to be extremely sensitive to minute stress changes," said co-author Professor Roland Bürgmann of the UC Berkeley faculty of earth and planetary science.

"Seismic waves from the other side of the planet triggered tremors on the Cascadia subduction zone off the coast of Washington state after the Sumatra earthquake last year, while the Denali earthquake in 2002 triggered tremors on a number of faults in California."

"Now we also see that tides -– the daily lunar and solar tides -– very strongly modulate tremors."

It is this extreme sensitivity to stress that lead researcher to conclude that highly pressurised water underground was acting as a lubricant.

"The big finding is that there is very high fluid pressure down there, that is, lithostatic pressure, which means pressure equivalent to the load of all rock above it, 15 to 30 kilometers (10 to 20 miles) of rock," said co-author and seismologist Robert Nadeau of the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory.

"Water under very high pressure essentially lubricates the rock, making the fault very weak."

UC Berkeley seismologists began looking for tremors five years ago in seismic recordings from the Parkfield segment of the San Andreas Fault.

Using eight years of tremor data, researchers correlated tremor activity with the effects of the sun and moon on the crust and with the effects of ocean tides, which are driven by the moon.

Althogh tidal activity is not known to cause quakes directly, it has been known to cause clusters of deep tremors.

Researchers are still trying to develop a coherent model to explain the behaviour of the San Andreas Fault.

"These tremors represent slip along the fault 25 kilometers (15 miles) underground, and this slip should push the fault zone above in a similar pattern," Professor Bürgmann said.

"But it seems like it must be very subtle, because we actually don't see a tidal signal in regular earthquakes."

"Even though the earthquake zone also sees the tidal stress and also feels the added periodic behaviour of the tremor below, they don't seem to be very bothered."

But Nadeau emphasises: "It is certainly in the realm of reasonable conjecture that tremors are stressing the fault zone above it."

"The deep San Andreas Fault is moving faster when tremors are more active, presumably stressing the seismogenic zone, loading the fault a little bit faster."

"And that may have a relationship to stimulating earthquake activity."

Nadeau is certainly encouraged by the new study and feels that more research is warranted.

"There is still all lot to learn about tremor and earthquakes in fault zones."

"The fact that we find tremors adjacent to a locked fault, like the one at Parkfield, makes you think there are some more important relationships going on here, and we need to study it more."

"Eventually units could be mass-produced and wrapped around unusual shapes for building-integrated solar, tents and maybe even clothing," said Greg Nielson, lead investigator at Sandia National Laboratories.

The silicon cells are manufactured using existing microelectronic and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) techniques -- similar to those used to create components such as computer processors and the accelerometers that allow handheld devices to detect motion.

By choosing Mems as the manufacturing process for the cells, researchers believe that they could be integrated with a variety of electronic components as well as battery capacity.

"Photovoltaic (PV) modules made from these microsized cells for the rooftops of homes and warehouses could have intelligent controls, inverters and even storage built in at the chip level," said Sandia field engineer Vipin Gupta."

"Such an integrated module could greatly simplify the cumbersome design, bid, permit and grid integration process that our solar technical assistance teams see in the field all the time."

Traditional PV technology makes it difficult to generate power economically -- but the microsized cells could be the solution to that problem.

"One of the biggest scale benefits is a significant reduction in manufacturing and installation costs compared with current PV techniques," said Sandia researcher Murat Okandan.

As well as being easier to manufacture, these tiny cells have other advantages over existing PV technology.

"The shade tolerance of our units to overhead obstructions is better than conventional PV panels because portions of our units not in shade will keep sending out electricity where a partially shaded conventional panel may turn off entirely," said Nielson.

The new cells are 10 times thinner than conventional 6 inch square cells, yet they have about the same efficiency.

"So they use 100 times less silicon to generate the same amount of electricity," Okandan said.

"Since they are much smaller and have fewer mechanical deformations for a given environment than the conventional cells, they may also be more reliable over the long term."

"This is a dramatic increase in the number of kids classified as autistic or documented on the spectrum of similar disorders," said Dr Beverly Mulvihill, University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) associate professor of public health and co-author on the study.

"It is not entirely clear what is causing the rise, but we know major collaborative efforts are needed to improve the understanding and lives of people and families impacted."

Data for the study was provided by the Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network.

The group collects information on new diagnoses of 'autism spectrum disorder' (ASD) from 11 partner organisations in Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, Pennsylvania,

ASD is an term used to describe three distinct types of condition that can be labelled as 'autism'; classic autism, Asperger's syndrome and atypical autism.

The study also found that gender seems to be a factor in autism -- boys are 4.5 times more likely than girls to have ASD, a result also found in previous studies.

"It still is not clear why males more frequently are affected," said Dr Martha Wingate, UAB assistant professor of public health and study co-author.

"One thing we know for sure is that more research is needed to quantify the effects of single or multiple factors such as diagnosis patterns, inclusion of milder cases and other components."

But not all experts in the field are convinced that there is a significant rise in ASD diagnoses amongst children.

Dr Max Wiznitzer, paedriatic neurologist at Rainbow Babies & Children's Hospital in Cleveland, Ohio, believes that many children are being incorrectly labelled as autistic.

He points out that 54% of children in the study were diagnosed with ASD, meaning that over half did not meet the criteria.

"This suggests that over-diagnosis is occurring in the population," Dr Wiznitzer said.

The report contained evidence from parents who suspected autism in their children before the age of two.

Parents found that they would have to wait up to three years before they could get an official diagnosis.

"That is...too late," said Dr Wiznitzer.

"We need to do a better job of identifying children earlier on."

Blue moons happen due to the mismatch between the lunar calendar and solar calendars.

This means in one solar year with 12 full moons, there are around 11 extra days. Every two or three years, these days accumulate to result in two full moons in one calendar month.

Although the exact reason for naming them blue moons is obscure, the convention is part of an old English tradition of giving each full moon in the year a name.

The first moon of the year was the Old Moon, followed by the Wold Moon, Lenten Moon, and so on.

In recorded history, the first known reference to a blue moon comes from a proverb recorded in 1528:

If they say the moon is blue / We must believe that it is true.

It was later that the phrase 'once in a blue moon' was coined to describe an event that was unlikely to happen.

Although blue moons happen every few years, rare atmospheric conditions can cause the moon to actually appear blue,

Particles of ash as emitted by the Krakatoa volcano in the 19th century can scatter the light reflected off the moon -- depending on the size of the particles, the light can take on a variety of hues.

This year's blue moon does have the distinction of being a rarity -- these bonus full moons only coincide with the New Year once every two decades.

Such a festive occasion deserves an appropriate drink -- how about some Blue Moon, a delicious Belgian-style wheat beer brewed in the USA?

"These long-ago brewers were practicing genetics without even knowing it," said Professor Gavin Sherlock of Stanford University School of Medicine.

"They've given us a very interesting opportunity to look at a relatively young, rapidly changing species, as well as some very good beer."

The story of lager begins with medieval Bavarians who forbade the brewing of beer in the summer months due to spoilage.

They chose instead to brew using ale yeast in the winter months -- colder temperatures inhibited the ale yeast and allowed hybridisation with another strain that thrived in the cold.

Analysis of lager yeast DNA reveals that hybridisation occurred not once but twice.

"It's possible that the ale strain provides a certain flavour profile, while the second strain conferred the ability to ferment at cooler temperatures," said Dunn.

"Mixing them together is a nice way for the yeast to double its genetic options."

Looking at the genetic research into lager yeast provides an insight into the history of brewing in Europe over the last 500 years.

One lineage is tied to the Carlsberg breweries in Denmark along with several breweries in the Czech Republic.

The other line is associated with breweries in the Netherlands, including Heineken.

By careful of analysis of how lager yeast's genetic profile has changed over the years, scientists can better determine what genetic traits please drinkers.

"When we look at the genes that have either been lost or amplified in copy number, we can make the case that some of them could be related to brewing," said Professor Sherlock.

"People don't consume as much calcium as nutritionists would like, and one reason for this is that foods high in calcium don't taste good to many people," said Dr Michael G. Tordoff in a presentation to the 236th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society.

"Tweaking its taste could encourage a calcium-deficient population to consume more of this key nutrient."

"By understanding how calcium is detected in the mouth, we can either make it easier to consume by reducing its bad taste or even make pharmacological agents that make it taste better."

Researchers at Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia discovered that the taste of calcium is detected by two distinct receptors on the mouse's tongue.

One is a calcium-sensing receptor called CaSR, also found in the parathyroid glands, kidney, brain and gastrointestinal tract.

"We didn't know it was on the tongue before," Dr Tordoff said.

The other is a receptor known as T1R3, a component of the 'sweet-taste' receptor -- a finding that researchers described as 'very unexpected.'

Dr Tordoff and his colleagues looked at the calcium preferences of 40 different strains of mice.

"Most mice dislike calcium, but we found a very unusual strain that drinks it avidly," he said.

"By comparing the genes of this strain with other strains, we were able to identify the two calcium taste genes."

Now they must see if humans have a similar capacity.

"It remains to be seen if what we have discovered in mice -- the existence of two calcium taste genes -- holds true for humans," said Dr Tordoff.

"We know people have the sweet-taste gene, Tas1r3, and the gene involved with the calcium-sensing receptor, CaSR."

"We don't know if we have the same forms of genes as the mice have, but it seems pretty likely they have the same function."

But what does calcium actually taste of?

"Calcium tastes calciumy," Dr Tordoff said.

"There isn't a better word for it."

"It is bitter, perhaps even a little sour."

"But it's much more because there are actual receptors for calcium, not just bitter or sour compounds."

The molecule's existence was predicted over 20 years -- now scientists are discovering how it 'burns up' or oxidises pollutants, such as nitrogen compounds from factories and cars.

Pollutants that aren't processed then fall back to earth in the form of acid rain.

"The chemical details of how the atmosphere removes nitric acid have not been clear," said Professor Joseph Francisco of Purdue University.

"This gives us important insights into this process."

"Without that knowledge we really can't understand the conditions under which nitric acid is removed from the atmosphere."

"This becomes important in emerging industrial nations such as China, India and Brazil where there are automobiles and factories that are unregulated."

"This chemistry will give us insight into the extent that acid rain will be a future concern."

The newly discovered molecule has two hydrogen bonds, which allows it to form a six-sided ring structure.

Hydrogen bonds are normally weaker than other bonds between the atoms in a molecule, known as covalent bonds.

Covalent bonds are 20 times stronger than hydrogen bonds -- yet these two hydrogen bonds are strong enough to affect the atmosphere.

"We've speculated about this unusual atmospheric species for many years, and then to actually see it and learn about its properties was very exciting," said Professor Marsha Lester of the University of Pennsylvania.

"The reaction involving this molecule proceeds faster as you go to lower temperatures, which is the opposite of most chemical reactions."

"The rate of reaction also changes depending on the atmospheric pressure, and most reactions don't depend on external pressure."

"The molecule also exhibits unusual quantum properties."

Professor Lester pointed out that it was these unusual properties that left the molecule undiscovered for so long.

"This is not how we explain chemistry to high school students," she said.

The research effort centres on so-called metamaterials -- these are artificially engineered structures that have properties not known iin nature, such as the ability to reverse light.

"We are not actually cloaking anything," said Jason Valentine, one of the researchers working on the project.

"I don't think we have to worry about invisible people walking around any time soon."

"To be honest, we are just at the beginning of doing anything like that."

Two different type of metamaterial are being investigated -- one is a fishnet of metal layers, while another uses tiny silver wires, both at the nanoscale level.

Using these metamaterials, researchers have created a scenario where a physical substance has a 'negative refractive index' -- changing the way that it is percieved.

"In naturally occurring material, the index of refraction, a measure of how light bends in a medium, is positive," said Valentine.

"When you see a fish in the water, the fish will appear to be in front of the position it really is."

"Or if you put a stick in the water, the stick seems to bend away from you."

But Valentine pointed out that negative refraction leads to some unusual effects.

"Instead of the fish appearing to be slightly ahead of where it is in the water, it would actually appear to be above the water's surface," he said.

"It's kind of weird."

For now, the technology could be used to improve optical devices -- leading to better microscopes that can observe a living virus in situ.

"However, cloaking may be something that this material could be used for in the future," Valentine said.

"You'd have to wrap whatever you wanted to cloak in the material."

"IIt would just send light around."

"By sending light around the object that is to be cloaked, you don't see it."

"Menthol stimulates the cooling receptors in the lung and oral pharynx," said Professor Gregory Connolly Howard of the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), co-author of the paper.

"It makes smoking easier."

Menthol appears as an additive in around 90% of cigarettes manufactured in the US -- but only a third of these brands are explicitly marketed as mentholated.

"For decades, the tobacco industry has carefully manipulated menthol content not only to lure youth but also to lock in lifelong adult customers," said co-author Professor Howard Koh, associate dean of Public Health Practice at HSPH.

Yet the tobacco industry denies that there is any strategy to deliberately hook young smokers.

"There is very little direct relevant data that shows menthol affects initiation," said David Sylvia, a spokesperson for Philip Morris, makers of Marlboro amongst others.

Sylvia was adamant that their products 'were not designed for nor marketed to underage smokers.'

The study also looked at the ethnicity of adult smokers -- they found that African Americans were more likely to smoke menthol cigarettes than any other group.

"This is another example of the cynical behaviour of the tobacco industry to hook teens and African Americans to a deadly addiction," said Professor Connolly.

"This is after the industry told the American public it had changed its marketing practices."

A bill currently before Congress would give the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) powers to regulate additives such as menthol -- at present, they have no authority to act.

"The FDA bill provides the vehicle to end the hypocrisy and save the lives of the young and a targeted minority group," Professor Connolly said.

Existing DNA manipulation techniques use chemicals, but long strands can often break.

The new process, developed by Kyohei Terao from Kyoto University, and his colleagues from the University of Tokyo, uses microscopic bobbins and hooks controlled by lasers to delicately hold and straighten a DNA strand.

The bobbins and hooks are made from a polymer called SU-8 photoresist that doesn't bind to DNA, thereby preventing damage.

The laser acts in effect as set of 'optical tweezers'.

"When a DNA molecule is manipulated and straightened by microhooks and bobbins, the gene location can be determined easily with high-spatial resolution," said Terao.

The technique isn't very different traditional sewing and knitting, apart from the scale.

"The microhooks and bobbins were inspired by manipulation of thread using our fingers," Terao said.

The breakthough was described as 'an excellent idea to fabricate unique microtools that enables us to manipulate a single giant DNA molecule' by Yoshinobu Baba, a researcher into biological microdevices at Nagoya University, Japan.

He believes that the process will eventually be useful for DNA sequencing and molecular electronics, amongst other applications.

Other scientists in the field also welcomed the development, but noted that real-world applications for the technique are a long way off.

"This is an impressive piece of microengineering," said Edwin Cuppen of the Netherlands Institute for Developmental Biology in Utrecht.

"However, relevant applications are still pretty far down the road -- there will be a major challenge for applying this to complex genomes such as those of vertebrates and man."

"Our biggest problem is that we are too good to be true," said John Rivera, chairman of Sustainable Power Corporation.

"We can literally replace every gallon of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel in the United States using just 12 per cent of the waste by-products in the country."

Rivera has spent 21 years and US$31 million (£15.6 million) developing the secret process.

A reactor is filled with farm waste such as hulls and cracked soy beans -- what results is a biogenic crude oil dubbed Vertroleum that Rivera claims is superior to crude from fossil sources.

Rivera contends that products made from Vertroleum burn at near 100 per cent efficiency -- minimising pollution and waste heat.

"Anyone you tell about this will call you a liar," said Rivera.

What is even more unbelievable is that the sole by-product from the process is an organic fertiliser.

"The fertiliser is worth about 15 cents (8p) per pound, but the fuel by-product is worth much more," said Gerald Brent, general manager of Sustainable Power Corporation.

Sustainable Power Corporation are now developing a new facility that will boast 400 reactors -– each producing 6,000 gallons of crude daily -– and a Vetroleum-powered 500 megawatt energy plant, capable of supplying 400,000 homes with power.

Brent hopes that the facility will be ready within the next 12 to 18 months.

"We have to build this from the ground up," he said.

"This is just our proof-of-concept."

About 10,000 litres of milk have been sent to EU Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel in the last two weeks.

"Unfortunately, a lot of the milk had gone off and some of the cartons had burst," said an unnamed Commission official.

"So it was all a bit smelly and messy."

Rather than throw away milk that is worth next to nothing, they came up with the novel idea of posting it to the EU Commission as a way of drawing attention to their plight.

"We have to, unfortunately, throw it away," said Michael Mann, spokesperson for Commissioner Boel.

"We are conscious of their concerns, but we don't think it's a good idea and they should send it to a good cause."

World prices for milk have risen -- but this has not translated into higher prices for German farmers, one reason why they went on strike in May.

During the dispute they fed milk to calves in public and poured it on fields as fertiliser.

As a result, the supermarket chain Lidl raised milk prices.

The latest protest has been prompted by the EU's decision in April to raise milk quotas by 2% to curb rising prices and meet growing demand.

Boel has pleaded with the farmers to find a better way to demonstrate their anger.

"If you would like to keep on sending milk, I can suggest that it would be better put to a good use in your local area," she said.

"We found that imagery leads to a short-term memory trace that can bias future perception," said Joel Pearson, lead author of the study and research associate at the Vanderbilt Department of Psychology.

"This is the first research to definitively show that imagining something changes vision both while you are imagining it and later on."

"These findings are important because they suggest a potential mechanism by which top-down expectations or recollections of previous experiences might shape perception itself."

The findings of the study show that the process can happen instantaneously.

"You might think you need to imagine something 10 times or 100 times before it has an impact," said Frank Tong, co-author of the study and associate professor of psychology.

"Our results show that even a single instance of imagery can tilt how you see the world one way or another, dramatically, if the conditions are right."

Previous research into vision has been stymied by the subjective nature of how we perceive imagery.

"It has been very hard to pin down in the laboratory what exactly someone is experiencing when it comes to imagery, because it is so subjective," said Tong.

"We found that the imagery effect, while found in all of our subjects, could differ a lot in strength across subjects."

"So this might give us a metric to measure the strength of mental imagery in individuals and how that imagery may influence perception."

The study may help to settle a long-standing debate in the field -- is vision a literal representation of what is there or is it something more abstract?

"More recently, with advances in human brain imaging, we now know that when you imagine something parts of the visual brain do light up and you see activity there," said Pearson.

"So there's more and more evidence suggesting that there is a huge overlap between mental imagery and seeing the same thing."

"Our work shows that not only are imagery and vision related, but imagery directly influences what we see."

"Mars saw the potential this research holds to help accelerate what farmers have been doing since the beginning of time with traditional breeding, ultimately improving cocoa trees, yielding higher quality cocoa and increasing income for farmers," said Dr Howard-Yana Shapiro, global director of plant science for Mars.

"The genome is the road map."

"It's our responsibility to the farmers to do this work."

Results of the five year project will be freely available in the public domain through the Public Intellectual Property Resource for Agriculture.

As well as investing $10 million in a joint project with IBM to use supercomputers in the effort, Mars will also work closely with scientists from the US Agriculture Department (USAD).

"Once we have the whole genome, they'll be able to go in and look at all the genes they're interested in," said Ray Schnell, a geneticist at USAD's subtropical horticulture research station in Florida.

"They'll all be interested in flavour genes."

Participants in the project were keen to talk up the potential benefits of the project to Africa -- the continent produces around 70 percent of the world's cocoa.

"This collaboration is an opportunity for us to apply our computational biology and supercomputing expertise to help improve an economically important agricultural crop," said Dr Mark Dean, vice president of Technical Strategy and Global Operations at IBM Research.

"We look forward to helping the agricultural community in Africa, and in other emerging markets."

Oxytocin is a natural hormone that assists childbirth and promotes bond between mothers and babies.

Now scientists have determined that oxytocin is effective in curing anxiety, social phobias, and could even be used to alleviate the effects of autism.

"Tests have shown that oxytocin reduces anxiety levels in users," said Professor Paul Zak, a neuroscientist based at California's Claremont Graduate University.

"It is a hormone that facilitates social contact between people."

"What's more, it is a very safe product that does not have any side effects and is not addictive."

Zak tested the hormone on hundreds of patients and found that it curbed the instincts of wariness and suspicion that lead to anxiety.

“We’ve seen that it makes you care about the other person," said Zak.

"It also increases your generosity towards that person."

"That’s why [the hormone] facilitates social interaction.”

Oxytocin could provide a lifeline to those caring for people with autism, a notoriously difficult condition to treat.

Researchers in New York found that oxytocin reduces the adverse effects of autism such as anxiety.

“Oxytocin does not cure autism, but it does reduce the symptoms,” Professor Zak said.

“So there is a reduction of anxiety in autistic patients, and the oxytocin can induce them to do things like make eye contact with other people and look at their faces -- something autistic people find hard to do.”

Dr Bart Jacobs of Radboud University in the Netherlands used a laptop to clone a smartcard used to enter a public building in the country.

"An employee can be cloned by bumping into that person with a portable card reader," said Dr Jacobs.

"The person whose identity is being stolen may then be completely unaware that anything has happened."

"At the technical level there are currently no known countermeasures."

The Dutch government was so alarmed to hear of the breach that they posted armed guards at all buildings using the smartcards -- the guards will remain until the Mifare smartcards are replaced.

"We take this extremely seriously," said a spokesperson for the Dutch Interior Ministry.

"It's a national security issue."

"We're in the process of replacing the cards of all 120,000 civil servants at central government level at a cost of about €5 (£4) for each card."

Jacobs also travelled to London, where he used the same technique to ride around the city's public transport system for free -- the Oyster smartcard used in London also features Mifare chips.

He again used a laptop to reverse-engineer the algorithm used in the Mifare chip.

Transport for London (TfL) played down the significance of the discovery.

"This was not a hack of the Oyster system," said a spokesman for TfL.

"It was a single instance of a card being manipulated."

The manufacturers of the Mifare chip, NXP Semiconductors (a spin-off from Royal Dutch Philips), confirmed that they are fully aware of the issues around the compromised platform.

"We are aware that the Dutch researchers have reverse engineered the algorithm and we are taking this issue very seriously," said a spokesperson for the company.

"We've informed all of our system integrators and advised them to closely assess their systems."

"We're talking to the guys at Radboud University and have identified various counter measures."

Experts are unambiguous about the steps that now need to be taken.

"You only have to walk down the street to see contactless access control systems everywhere," said Adam Laurie, a computer security researcher.

"It used to be a magnetic strip, now it's a card held up to a reader on the wall."

"A large percentage of these will have Mifare technology and are very vulnerable to attack."

"They should all be replaced."

"Coffee drinkers can be reassured that coffee does not increase their risk of death," said lead author Dr Esther Lopez-Garcia of the University of Madrid.

The study looked at the risk of mortality for women who consumed four to five cups a day against those who didn't drink coffee.

Risk of death due to all causes was 26 per cent lower for the five-a-day coffee drinkers.

Women who drank two to three cups of coffee a day had a 17 per cent lower risk.

Whilst men also showed similar benefits, the difference was not deemed to be statistically significant.

For both genders, there was no greater or lower risk of death from cancer among coffee drinkers.

"Coffee consumption has been linked to various beneficial and detrimental health effects, but data on its relation with death were lacking," said Dr Lopez-Garcia.

"Regular coffee consumption was not associated with an increased mortality rate in either men or women."

The study is the latest in a long line that have rehabilitated foods that were dismissed as unhealthy.

"It's also happened with other foods and nutrients, for example with fats," Dr Lopez-Garcia said.

"They used to be bad -- now it has been discovered they are not so bad, even can be good for our health."

The report states that coffee needs further investigation for its potential benefits to health.

"The possibility of a modest benefit of coffee consumption on all cause and cardiovascular disease mortality needs to be further investigated," it says.

But Dr Lopez-Garcia is warning people with certain medical conditions to be careful about taking up coffee as a result of the study.

"We need more research," she said.

"We are very cautious when we say coffee is not bad because for people with cardiovascular disease, hypertension and insomnia, clearly it's not a good idea to start drinking coffee."

German archaeologist Karl Richard Lepsius discovered the Headless Pyramid in 1842 -- but it was lost beneath the sands of Saqqara, a royal burial site near Cairo.

"After Lepsius the location of the pyramid was lost and the substructure of [the] pyramid never known," said Zahi Hawass, secretary general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities.

"It was forgotten by people until we began to search this area and a hill of sand, maybe 25 feet {7.6 metres) high."

"Now we are sure that this pyramid is of a style of a pyramid of Dynasty V and belongs to a king called Menkauhor."

"There were missing pyramids of the kings, and this is one of them."

Menkauhor ruled Egypt in the 24th century BC and is the only Fifth Dynasty ruler whose pyramid has not been identified so far.

Archaeologists have not found inscriptions with the name of the pharaoh so far -- the attribution is based on architectural features.

As well as large red granite blocks at the entrance to the burial chamber, the lid of the sarcophagus is made of grey schist -- all characteristic of the Old Kingdom.

"The material of this sarcophagus was never used in the Middle Kingdom," Hawass said.

"The Middle Kingdom pyramids...have complicated corridors until you reach the burial chamber."

"Without discovering any inscription I tell you this is Old Kingdom."

"The substructure is exactly Dynasty V."

Hawass will continue investigating Saqqara -- he believes that the only one third of the site has been fully investigated.

"You never know what secrets the sands of Egypt hide," he said.

"I always believe there will be more pyramids to discover."

The study used a simple marker pen costing $6 (£3) to darken the rust-coloured breast feathers of the New Jersey barn swallow -- making lighter coloured birds look like those naturally darkest.

As a result, their biochemistry began to change -- they started producing more testosterone,

"The experimental manipulation didn't just improve their looks in the eyes of the females, it actually changed their body chemistry," said Professsor Rebecca Safran, lead author and an evolutionary biologist based at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

"A male barn swallow can't look in a mirror and assess his social status."

"But if he flies into a group of other swallows, the birds will quickly assess it for him and give him a sense of where he fits in."

What surprised researchers was that the changes in testosterone manifested one week after the birds were marked -- a surprisingly short period of time for such a drastic change.

"Other females might be looking at them as being a little more sexy, and the birds might be feeling better about themselves in response to that," said Professor Kevin McGraw, co-author and a fellow evolutionary biologist based at Arizona State University.

Safran paraphrased Shakespeare to draw a parallel between avian and human behaviour.

"It's the 'clothes make the man' idea," she said.

"It's like you walk down the street and you're driving a Rolls Royce and people notice."

"And your physiology accommodates this."

But shr thinks that we should be wary of making too many comparisons between birds and humans.

Barn swallows are 'socially monogamous and genetically promiscuous, same as humans,' she said.

"There are some interesting parallels, but we do need to be careful about making them."

Harvard researchers were inspired by a talk given by Dr Rodney Bee, a chemist with Unilever -- the company is a major producer of ice cream, amongst other food products.

Bee showed how esing a simple kitchen mixer, he had managed to create ice cream with bubbles one micrometer in size.

"Small bubbles on that scale never last because of surface tension -- they instantly disappear." said Professor Howard Stone of Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).

"What Rodney showed on that screen was extraordinary,"

"I asked him how he created his foams, and he said he used an ordinary kitchen mixer."

"The next day I went out and bought a kitchen mixer for the lab."

SEAS graduate student Emilie Dressaire worked with Stone to formulate a syrupy mixture of simple sugars and water.

When the mixture was whipped, a foam was created with a crystalline structure that protected the bubbles from popping.

"The bubbles are fairly happy in it," said Dressaire.

"We were able to keep them for a year."

The bubbles could be modified for other uses, such as cosmetics or as contrast agents for ultrasound imaging.

They could even be used to replace fat molecules in food products, such as ice cream and mayonnaise.

"The lifetime is so long, which is the interesting part for industry," Dressaire said.

The Russian-made toilet began malfunctioning last week, but the exact cause in unclear.

Until the problem is resolved, astronauts have been improvising by using plastic bags to deal with waste.

But their ordeal should end soon -- Nasa will launch the Discovery space shuttle this weekend with replacement parts on board,

"We will be taking some spare parts up," said Allard Beutel, spokesperson for Nasa.

"You can imagine you are having guests over and your one and only bathroom is broken."

"Clearly this is something you want to have working."

To make room for the replacement parts, Nasa are leaving behind items of non-essential cargo -- including several wrenches and a spare part for the space station's oxygen generator.

"Clearly, having a working toilet is a priority for us, so some of these things that we didn't need for the next six months or so could wait," said Scott Higginbotham, Discovery's payload manager.

Discovery's commander sounded an optomistic note as he arrived at the launch site.

"We hear it's in great shape," said Mark Kelly, referring to the shuttle's readiness for flight.

"As soon as we get a couple more spare parts that I'm sure some of you guys have heard about...we're going to be all ready to go."

A team from the biology and the mathematics departments of Davidson College in North Carolina and Missouri Western State University added genes to E. coli bacteria to solve a classic mathematical puzzle, known as the burnt pancake problem.

The burnt pancake problem involves a stack of pancakes of different sizes, each of which has a golden and a burnt side.

This stack must be sorted so that the largest pancake is on the bottom and all pancakes are golden side up.

Each flip reverses the order and the orientation of one or several consecutive pancakes.

The aim of the exercise is to stack them correctly in the fewest number of flips.

To solve the problem, the researchers used fragments of DNA as the pancakes.

Genes were added from a different type of bacterium to enable the E. coli to flip the DNA 'pancakes'.

A gene that made the bacteria antibiotic-resistant was also added, but only when the DNA fragments had been flipped into the right order.

The time required to reach the mathematical solution with the bacteria reflects the minimum number of flips needed to solve the burnt pancake problem.

"The system offers several potential advantages over conventional computers" says Dr Karmella Haynes of Davidson College, a lead researcher.

"A single flask can hold billions of bacteria, each of which could potentially contain several copies of the DNA used for computing."

"These 'bacterial computers' could act in parallel with each other, meaning that solutions could potentially be reached quicker than with conventional computers, using less space and at a lower cost.

Made of resin from the Boswellia plant, frankincense has not been previously been thought to have any effect on the brain.

"In spite of information stemming from ancient texts, constituents of Boswellia had not been investigated for psychoactivity," said Professor Raphael Mechoulam of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, one of the research study's co-authors.

"We found that incensole acetate, a Boswellia resin constituent, when tested in mice lowers anxiety and causes antidepressive-like behaviour."

"Apparently, most present day worshippers assume that incense burning has only a symbolic meaning."

When administered to mice, incensole acetate affects areas of the brain involved with emotion as well as areas known to be affected by current anxiety and depression medications.

The compound activates a mammalian brain protein called TRPV3, known to play a role in the perception of warmth on the skin.

Incensole acetate's effects could point the way to an entirely new class of depression and anxiety drugs.

"Perhaps Marx wasn't too wrong when he called religion the opium of the people," said Dr Gerald Weissmann, editor-in-chief of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology Journal.

"Morphine comes from poppies, cannabinoids from marijuana, and LSD from mushrooms -- each of these has been used in one or another religious ceremony."

"Studies of how those psychoactive drugs work have helped us understand modern neurobiology."

"The discovery of how incensole acetate, purified from frankincense, works on specific targets in the brain should also help us understand diseases of the nervous system."

"This study also provides a biological explanation for millennia-old spiritual practices that have persisted across time, distance, culture, language, and religion -- burning incense really does make you feel warm and tingly all over!"