Your genes could be a strong predictor of whether you stray into a life of crime, according to a recent study that focused on whether genes are likely to cause a person to become a life-course persistent offender, which is characterized by antisocial behavior during childhood that can later progress to violent or serious criminal…
President Obama pledged in the State of the Union address to use government power to balance the scale between America’s rich and the rest of the public, trying to present an election-year choice between continued leadership toward an economy “built to last” and what he called irresponsible policies of the past that caused an economic…
Frenetic star-forming activity in the early Universe is linked to the most massive galaxies in today’s cosmos, new research suggests. This “starbursting” activity when the Universe was just a few billion years old appears to have been clamped off by the growth of supermassive black holes. An international team gathered hints of the mysterious “dark…
Lord Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of the Commonwealth, says science and religion can mix, and he has set out to move the argument forward by considering the nexus of science and faith in a century he believes will be more religious than the last. ”Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion…
Unemployment time series in Spain behave in a chaotic way according to a study at the University of Seville. Such chaos demonstrates the complex and unpredictable nature of the Spanish labour market in the long run. However, short term patterns can be predicted using complex mathematical models.
Six world-renowned scientists explain the history of the universe and reflect on how this knowledge affects their perspective of the universe and our place in it.
Tiny prints from baby dinosaurs dot the oldest dinosaur nesting site found to date, a 190-million-year-old nursery in South Africa, researchers said. The hatchery and the baby footprints around it are significant clues about the evolution of complex family behaviors in early dinosaurs, providing the oldest-known evidence that dinosaur hatchlings remained at nests long enough…
Psilocybin, the active ingredient in so-called magic mushrooms, may help people with depression, based on two studies that suggest that the drug could have an enduring effect on patients. In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 30 healthy volunteers took psilocybin intravenously and had their brains observed with magnetic…
Obsessive gamers’ hours at the computer have now topped scientists’ efforts to improve a model enzyme, in what researchers say is the first crowdsourced redesign of a protein. The online game Foldit allows players to fiddle at folding proteins on their home computers in search of the best-scoring (lowest-energy) configurations. Researchers have previously reported successes…
Scientists at Denmark’s Niels Bohr Institute have figured out a cool new way to lower the temperature of hot semiconductors. In a seemingly paradoxical new study, the scientists showed that light from a laser caused the temperature of semiconductor material to drop–and not by just a few degrees. The temperature fell to -269 Celsius –…