Attention, college students cramming between midterms and finals: Binging on soda and sweets for as little as six weeks may make you stupid. A new UCLA rat study is the first to show how a diet steadily high in fructose slows the brain, hampering memory and learning — and how omega-3 fatty acids can counteract […] … learn more→

On May 5, 2012, Japan shut down its Tomari 3 nuclear reactor on the northern island of Hokkaido for inspection, marking the first time in over 40 years that the country had not a single nuclear power plant generating electricity. The March 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and subsequent Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdown shattered public confidence in […] … learn more→

GABORONE, BOTSWANA. You wouldn’t know there’s a food crisis in Botswana, one of Africa’s wealthiest and most stable countries, because it’s a silent one. This is not the doom and gloom Africa that we often hear sensationalized in the media as a place of coups, famines and corruption. No, Botswana is a model African state […] … learn more→

Researchers at the University of Melbourne have identified a formula to understand why some branded movies go viral on the internet. In a study of more than 130 YouTube movies created by some of the biggest brands, researchers identified patterns which form the basis of a Branded Viral Movie Predictor algorithm, which they say identifies […] … learn more→

Late last week, Google representatives unveiled a significant enhancement to the company’s ubiquitous search engine. They’re calling it the “Knowledge Graph” and claiming it will support “more intelligent searching for real-world things on the internet”. And while it might be a while before Australian users have access to the Knowledge Graph, the US roll-out is […] … learn more→

New research indicates that domestic horses originated in the steppes of modern-day Ukraine, southwest Russia and west Kazakhstan, mixing with local wild stocks as they spread throughout Europe and Asia. For several decades scientists puzzled over the origin of domesticated horses. Based on archaeological evidence, it had long been thought that horse domestication originated in […] … learn more→

For the first time, researchers have been able to combine different climate models using spatial statistics – to project future seasonal temperature changes in regions across North America. They performed advanced statistical analysis on two different North American regional climate models and were able to estimate projections of temperature changes for the years 2041 to […] … learn more→

Researchers have created a next-generation zoom function to view and compare portions of complex graphics such as city maps, scientific images or pages of text. The new tool, PolyZoom, makes it possible to simultaneously magnify many parts of a graphic without losing sight of the original picture. \”With standard programs, once you zoom in you […] … learn more→

No one could have been very surprised, not even M. Sarkozy, when François Hollande was elected as the second socialist president of the Fifth Republic, the first since François Mitterrand in 1981. Only a few months ago, he would have seemed a very unlikely president. What transformed his prospects was not the economic and political […] … learn more→

Scientists are more confident than ever that climate change is happening and is largely caused by human activities. Yet, according to a recent poll, the American public is less likely to believe that climate change is caused by humans than they were even last year. When it comes to climate science, are we a misinformation […] … learn more→