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Men, women get turned on equally fast

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.”

Online Science Resource: Directory of Open Access Journals

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.”

Men, women have similar rates of compulsive buying

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.

The Cambrian Explosion: Triggered by Mega-mountains?

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.

‘Intelligent Design’ attack on UK school science

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.

Scare Tactics

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.

New Organization Seeks Public Spirited Scientists and Engineers

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.

Entanglement unties a tough quantum computing problem

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.