ScienceBlog.com

A new McGill University study that used thermal imaging technology for the first time ever to measure sexual arousal rates has turned the conventional wisdom that women become aroused more slowly than men on its head. “Comparing sexual arousal between men and women, we see that there is no difference in the amount of time it takes healthy young men and women to reach peak arousal.”

If you’ve ever burned your dinner, you know how startling a smoke alarm can be. Now, imagine you’re 220 miles away from Earth in an orbiting lab when the alarm sounds. Fires are no laughing matter on Earth, but in space they could be even more devastating.

From the Front Page:

“Welcome to the Directory of Open Access Journals. This service covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals. We aim to cover all subjects and languages. There are now 2401 journals in the directory. Currently 697 journals are searchable at article level. As of today 109840 articles are included in the DOAJ service.”

Contrary to popular opinion, nearly as many men as women experience compulsive buying disorder, a condition marked by binge buying and subsequent financial hardship, according to new research from the Stanford University School of Medicine. “The widespread opinion that most compulsive buyers are women may be wrong,” the researchers wrote in their paper, which will be published in the October issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry.

A continental crash that raised one of the biggest mountain chains in the Earth’s history may be responsible for the explosive diversification of animals more than 500 million years ago.

…Rick Squire suggests the trigger for the Cambrian Explosion was the collision of a series of three large continental blocks – now called Arabia, India, and Antarctica – with the eastern edge of Africa.

Parents are being encouraged to challenge their children’s science teachers over what they are explaining as the origins of life.

An organisation called Truth in Science has also sent resource packs to all UK secondary school science departments.

It promotes the idea of intelligent design – that there was an intelligence behind the creation of the universe.

A new study from the British Economic and Social Research Council and reported today in the Washington Post finds that fear and guilt are actually poor motivators when it comes to getting people to change unhealthy habits. The idea seems to be that fear and guilt may do nothing more than produce more fear and guilt — and, worse, defeatism. A far more effective approach, the researchers say, is to give people concrete suggestions on how to change their behavior and confidence that they can do things like quit smoking or start a daily exercise program.

Leptin protects HSC from in vitro and in vivo apoptosis

Regenerating HSCs expressed increased p75NTR and SMA in vivo and showed an activated phenotype and the high expression of HGF and IL-6 in vitro. Enhanced cell death was seen in HSCs, both from normal and regenerating liver, after treatment with NGF.

MY GROUP. Melatonin prevents H2O2-induced activation of HSCs and auguments C/EBP-?.

I’m a scientist, and I vote. Yes I have a party affiliation, and yes I have a political bias, but most of all I want to see science respected in the political process. So today, I joined Scientists and Engineers for America. Read on for the Mission Statement that I lifted from their website. If you want a more partisan approach, here’s one of my book reviews.

Error correction coding is a fundamental process that underlies all of information science, but the task of adapting classical codes to quantum computing has long bumped up against what seemed to be a fundamental limitation. But a new approach by three theorists working at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering could change the rules of the game. Adding entangled photons as part of the message stream, they report in Science, opens the door to use of the entire error coding playbook.

The Malmö, Sweden, based company Polar Rose sayss it will soon introduce a Web-based search engine that can find photographs of people by analyzing pictures and identifying faces. The search engine ­– which will be the first of its kind in the world ­– is the result of research carried out by Jan Erik Solem at Technology and Society, Malmö University College.

New survey data finds the Iraqi public demonstrates the highest levels of intolerance of foreigners and other social out-groups out of 80 countries for which data is available, along with extraordinarily high levels of ethnic solidarity. The implications for the future of Iraq include a set of direct challenges to the emergence of stable democracy as well as the possibility that a restoration of order and security could reverse these trends over time.

The growing fad of smoking tobacco through a waterpipe, sometimes known as a hookah, is rapidly turning into a worrisome epidemic, according to a Georgetown University researcher who says smokers who think this form of tobacco use is less toxic than cigarettes are wrong.

A new research study from Loma Linda University (LLU) shows that adding just a handful of pecans to your diet each day may inhibit unwanted oxidation of blood lipids, thus helping reduce the risk of heart disease. Researchers suggest that this positive effect was in part due to the pecan’s significant content of vitamin E.

Astronomers using the National Science Foundation’s Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope have discovered key evidence that may help them figure out how very massive stars can form. “We think we know how stars like the Sun are formed, but there are major problems in determining how a star 10 times more massive than the Sun can accumulate that much mass. The new observations with the VLA have provided important clues to resolving that mystery,” said Maria Teresa Beltran, of the University of Barcelona in Spain.

NASA’s Mars Rover Opportunity has arrived at the rim of a crater approximately five times wider than a previous stadium-sized one it studied for half a year. Initial images from the rover’s first overlook after a 21-month journey to “Victoria Crater” show rugged walls with layers of exposed rock and a floor blanketed with dunes. The far wall is approximately 800 meters (one-half mile) from the rover.

Parasitic plants do not haphazardly flail about looking for a host but sense volatile chemicals produced by other plants and identify potential hosts by their emissions, according to a team of Penn State chemical ecologists.

An egg-shaped fullerene, or “buckyball egg” has been made and characterized by chemists at UC Davis, Virginia Tech and Emory and Henry College, Va. The unexpected discovery opens new possibilities for structures for fullerenes, which could have a wide range of uses. “It was a total surprise,” said Christine Beavers, a chemistry graduate student working with Professors Alan Balch and Marilyn Olmstead at UC Davis. Beavers is first author on the paper, published this month in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.