SciDev.Net brings you the most commented on articles in 2012, including news, editorials and opinions, spanning topics as diverse as wind energy, access to weather data and communicating science.
Changes in the brain linked to childhood abuse and maltreatment may prime a child for future mental health problems, new research finds. The study, which compared the brains of teenagers who had been abused as children with those of very similar teens who had not experienced any mistreatment, is one of the first to follow…
When a killer seaweed touches a kind of spiky coral, the coral pushes a chemical panic button that brings small resident fish to the rescue. Unchecked, seaweed algae can overrun a coral reef, as the community dwindles in “a descent into slime,” says marine ecologist Mark Hay of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta….
Hypothesis: Scientists have a superior ability to root out gender bias in their labs because they are trained to rigorously reject subjective criteria. Experimental result: Naaahhh. Yale University researchers asked 127 scientists to review a job application of identically qualified male and female students and found that the faculty members – both men and women…
Sometimes, history really does seem to repeat itself. For the past 15 years, Peter Turchin, who studies population dynamics at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, has been taking the mathematical techniques that once allowed him to track predator–prey cycles in forest ecosystems, and applying them to human history. He has analyzed historical records on…
The ancient Greeks called it “the madness of the gods”; the author Sherwood Anderson dubbed it “the divine accident of life.” But as it turns out, love is neither madness nor an accident. The more we understand how the brain works, the more it seems we are programmed for love, just as we’re programmed to…
Some scientists are searching not just for any life out there in the universe, but for our distant relatives. Earth may have seeded life on other planets if an asteroid smacking into Earth sprayed DNA into space, researchers suggest. Now a team of researchers is searching for siblings of the sun — stars born from…