“The Anti-Thiel Fellowship That Pays Students $100K to Build Startups While in School”

“Baum admits that he respects Thiel, but he firmly believes in the value of staying in school. “I suspect that most of these companies will be 8- to 10- to 12-year endeavors,” he said. “Why not stay in school, finish your degree, and use…

“Male Scientist Writes of Life as Female Scientist”

“”By far,” Barres wrote, “the main difference I have noticed is that people who don’t know I am transgendered treat me with much more respect” than when he was a woman. “I can even complete a whole sentence without being interrupted by a…

“Scientists Discover The Process That Regulates Forgetting”

“Neurons are a type of brain cell, and the connections between these cells that facilitates…

“Don’t Listen to Music While Studying”

“”You’ve got semantic information that you’re trying to use when you’re reading a book, and you’ve got semantic information from the lyrics,” Perham says. “If you can understand the lyrics, it doesn’t matter whether you like it or not, it will impair your performance of reading…

“Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks”

“She’s Alive… Beautiful… Finite… Hurting… Worth Dying for.”

“Syncopation, Body-Movement and Pleasure in Groove Music”

“Structural complexity has been related to positive affect in music more broadly, but the function of syncopation in eliciting pleasure and body-movement in groove is unknown. Here we report results from a web-based survey which investigated the relationship between…

“Estimates of the Continuously Publishing Core in the Scientific Workforce”

“Using the entire Scopus database, we estimated that there are 15,153,100…

“Negative frequency-dependent preferences and variation in male facial hair”

“Women and men judged heavy stubble and full beards more attractive when presented in treatments where beards were rare than when they were common, with intermediate preferences when intermediate frequencies of beardedness were presented.”…

“The Questionable Link Between Saturated Fat and Heart Disease”

“Instead of meat, eggs and cheese, we’re eating more pasta, grains, fruit and starchy vegetables such as potatoes. Even seemingly healthy low-fat foods, such as yogurt, are stealth carb-delivery systems, since removing the fat often requires the addition of…

“Star Trek-style holodeck becomes reality as scientists invent 3D virtual reality system”

“Amnesty International offers an SOS app for activists”

“On a smartphone, the screen shows a calculator. Alerts can be set up to secretly transmit at timed intervals to rescue teams, relatives, Amnesty International or others. Panic notices – bearing text, the user’s coordinates, and a Google Maps link — can be sent by…

“The Valley is a Trough”

“We seem to have recently crested the hill of Stage 2: The Peak of Inflated Expectations. Scores of failures, few successes, and…

“10 Scientific Ideas That Scientists Wish You Would Stop Misusing”

They are: Proof, Theory, Quantum Uncertainty and Quantum Weirdness, Learned vs. Innate, Natural, Gene, Statistically Significant, Survival of the Fittest, Geologic Timescales, Organic…

“Illuminating neuron activity in 3-D”

“With this kind of microscope, the light emitted by the sample being imaged is sent through an array of lenses that refracts the light in different directions. Each point of the sample generates about 400 different points of light, which can then be recombined using a computer algorithm…

“Rescuing US biomedical research from its systemic flaws”

“We believe that the root cause of the widespread malaise is a longstanding assumption that the biomedical research system in the United States will expand indefinitely at a substantial rate. We are now faced with the stark realization that this is not the case. Over…

“The Real Reason Nobody Reads Academics”

“Cost isn’t the only problem. The journal system also fractures academic knowledge across dozens of different publications. It’a almost impossible to keep up with the papers being published. There’s no centralized list.”…

Live HD video stream of the Earth as seen from the International Space Station

“Brain Scans Link Concern for Justice with Reason Not Emotion”

“According to Decety, one implication is that the search for justice and the moral missions of human rights organizations and others do not come primarily from sentimental motivations, as they are often portrayed. Instead, that drive may have more to do with…

“CHILEAN INCUBATOR WANTS COMPANIES USING TECH TO HELP THE POOR”

“Drawing its own funding from grants, including ongoing support from the Inter-American Development Bank and Movistar Chile, Socialab then incubates the winning projects, encouraging the nascent companies to test their products on real users and continue to…

“Stanford Professor Andrei Linde celebrates physics breakthrough”

“MIA In The War On Cancer: Where Are The Low-Cost Treatments?”

“Take Michelle Holmes, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. She’s been trying for years to raise money for trials on the effects of aspirin on breast cancer. Animal studies, in vitro experiments and analysis of patient outcomes…

“Scenes from the Postdocalypse”

“CrowBox Wants You to Train Crows To Clean the Planet. Seriously.”

“So what can we teach these crows to do besides put coins in slots for peanuts? Well, what if the crows were then able to collect garbage in exchange for, well, peanuts of one form or another? What if the crows could be used for search and rescue, in the same…

“Why do we have blood types?”

“A French doctor injected calf’s blood into a madman, who promptly started to sweat and vomit and produce urine the colour of chimney soot. After another transfusion the man died.

Such calamities gave transfusions a bad reputation for 150 years. Even…

“Stress Affects Sperm RNA In Mice”

“Since it remained a possibility that the observed effects could be explained by social factors, the team isolated RNA from the sperm of traumatized males and injected it into the eggs of mice that had not been traumatized. This reproduced the depressive behaviors in the offspring, and also…

“Stephen Colbert Is the Best Source of Science on TV”

“The show has implicitly included science and scientists as an everyday part of our culture — even pop culture,” Malow says. “By incorporating science so often into an entertainment program, I think it’s done something important that even our best science programs don’t…

“So You’re Not Desirable …”

“For one of our studies, we recruited 129 heterosexual individuals across several small undergraduate classes. These individuals indicated, at both the beginning and the end of the semester, the extent to which the opposite-sex students in their class possessed a set of desirable qualities. We…