Science

Nature - and the news media, it seems - abhors a vacuum. That could explain the recent uproar over a talk by Dimitar Sasselov, a member of the planet-hunting Kepler space telescope's science team.

Kepler launched in March 2009 and has been hard at work staring at the same patch of sky in search of characteristic dips in starlight that would signal a passing planet. Progress has been fairly quick. Not long after reaching orbit, the telescope team released the vital stats on five confirmed planets and announced it had found 706 stars that seem to have planet potential.

Personalities come in all kinds. Now psychological scientists have found that the size of different parts of people's brains correspond to their personalities; for example, conscientious people tend to have a bigger lateral prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain involved in planning and controlling behavior.

SOME people may shudder at the idea of scientists creating synthetic life but not, it seems, the British. At least that's the message from a UK government-funded "dialogue" with the public about synthetic biology.

"We expected people to be very wary of claims about creating synthetic life, but they weren't," says Brian Johnson, the independent consultant who led the exercise. "They were quite relaxed about it, and seemed to see it as a natural extension of biological knowledge," he says.

AM I awake or am I dreaming?" I ask myself for probably the hundredth time. I am fully awake, just like all the other times I asked, and to be honest I am beginning to feel a bit silly. All week I have been performing this "reality check" in the hope that it will become so ingrained in my mind that I will start asking it in my dreams too.

High-energy particle accelerators are helping researchers investigate big questions about the nature of matter and the origins of the universe. Typical experiments involve carefully controlled collisions between either intersecting particle beams or a particle beam and an atomic-scale target.

Creating collisions at nanometer scale with picoseconds of duration requires extreme precision in spatial and temporal control.

Infamous British computer hacker Gary McKinnon last week managed to stave off extradition to the United States to be tried on charges that he broke into U.S. military and other government computers in 2001 and 2002. Key to his defense: He is a victim of Asperger’s Syndrome.

The cloud of ash blowing south from an Icelandic volcano last month was electrically charged. It's a finding that could be exploited to build detectors to warn pilots when they are flying into danger

Volcanic ash is deadly stuff for aircraft, and has been known to clog up engines and cause them to stall. But the disruption to European air traffic last month caused by the ash could have been reduced if pilots had an instrument that could detect ash clouds, says Giles Harrison of the meteorology department at the University of Reading in the UK.

Experts who studied almost 13,000 cell phone users over 10 years, hoping to find out whether the mobile devices cause brain tumours, said on Sunday their research gave no clear answer.

A study by the World Health Organisation's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), the largest ever to look at possible links between mobile phones and brain cancer, threw up inconclusive results but researchers said suggestions of a possible link demanded deeper examination.

J.D. Moyer decided recently to conduct a little experiment with artificial light and his sleep cycle.
The sleep-deprived Oakland, California, resident had read that strong light -- whether it's beaming down from the sun or up from the screens of personal electronics -- can reset a person's internal sleep clock.

So, for one month, whenever the sun set, he turned off all the gadgets and lights in his house -- from the bulb hidden in his refrigerator to his laptop computer.

Yeon-Kyun Shin, professor of biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology at ISU, has shown that the protein called synaptotagmin1 (Syt1) is the sole trigger for the release of neurotransmitters in the brain.

Prior to this research, Syt1 was thought to be a part of the protein structure (not the sole protein) that triggered the release of neurotransmitters at 10 parts per million of calcium.
Shin's research is published in the current issue of the journal Science.