In China, the deposit is in a high, frozen plateau, but many are in marine sediments. Last summer American scientists on a research vessel in the Gulf of Mexico drilled exploratory holes to look for gas hydrates buried deep in the sand. They discovered pockets of highly concentrated gas hydrate–examples of a deposit type that is estimated to hold 6,700 trillion cubic feet of the gas in that area alone.

“A lot of people think of it as unstable,” says U.S. Department of Energy’s methane hydrate R&D manager Ray Boswell. “It’s not particularly volatile.” Boswell points out that we’d actually have to work to pull it across a phase boundary, so extraction means melting the solid substance into its water and methane gas components underground.

The letters (to Hayden Planetarium director Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson), are well worth reading. Especially the second-to-last one.

While it seems obvious that we feel under-par when we are ill, Dr Harrison says there is more to it than just physical sickness.

“People have assumed that these are just natural consequences of having an infection,” he explained.

“But it seems that whatever the cause of the infection is, the symptoms are exactly the same.”

In other words, no matter what the type of infection or illness, the psychological feelings we experience are largely the same – meaning it is unlikely to be related to the infection itself.

Tests showed that flu-like infections stimulate a portion of the brain, the subgenual cingulate, that also becomes stimulated in cases of major depression. They say the discovery could, for one thing, lead to treatments for depression, at least when it occurs as the side effect of another medication.

WE’D booked the venue, chosen the bridesmaids’ dresses and even decided on the colours of the table decorations. But finding a refrigerated centrifuge and a ready supply of dry ice in rural south-west England was proving tricky. Then there were the worries about getting blood on my silk wedding dress, and what to do if someone fainted.

Organising a wedding can be stressful enough, but we had a whole extra dimension to consider. We were turning it into a science experiment to probe what happens in our bodies when we say the words “I do”.

…

it is clearly difficult to measure complex emotions with simple games in the lab. For one thing, volunteers know their actions are being recorded, which may alter their behaviour. For example, people who share more money with other players are usually seen as more altruistic, but maybe they just care more about what people think of them. In reality, they might be quite selfish.

“We’re not sure of the motivation that drives behaviour,” says Richard Ebstein, also at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who studies the genetics of human behaviour. That is why scientists need to start looking at hormones such as oxytocin in real-life situations, he says. Like weddings.

That’s where I came in. Once Nic, my husband-to-be, had resigned himself to turning the most romantic day of our lives into a science experiment, I realised there were several additional hormones we could check at the same time….

Lovely story. Sigh. Just lovely.

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Hey, look! PopSci just put 137 years of back issues on the internet for free. Science-aesthetic treasure!

They’re at Google Books, from whence this striking image came, or accessible through their own archive viewer.

The news spread on the Wired, but I first heard it via ear trumpet.

An earlier study by Kanazawa found that more intelligent individuals were more nocturnal, waking up and staying up later than less intelligent individuals. Because our ancestors lacked artificial light, they tended to wake up shortly before dawn and go to sleep shortly after dusk. Being nocturnal is evolutionarily novel.

In the current study, Kanazawa argues that humans are evolutionarily designed to be conservative, caring mostly about their family and friends, and being liberal, caring about an indefinite number of genetically unrelated strangers they never meet or interact with, is evolutionarily novel. So more intelligent children may be more likely to grow up to be liberals.

Data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) support Kanazawa’s hypothesis. Young adults who subjectively identify themselves as “very liberal” have an average IQ of 106 during adolescence while those who identify themselves as “very conservative” have an average IQ of 95 during adolescence.

Similarly, religion is a byproduct of humans’ tendency to perceive agency and intention as causes of events, to see “the hands of God” at work behind otherwise natural phenomena. “Humans are evolutionarily designed to be paranoid, and they believe in God because they are paranoid,” says Kanazawa. This innate bias toward paranoia served humans well when self-preservation and protection of their families and clans depended on extreme vigilance to all potential dangers. “So, more intelligent children are more likely to grow up to go against their natural evolutionary tendency to believe in God, and they become atheists.”

Young adults who identify themselves as “not at all religious” have an average IQ of 103 during adolescence, while those who identify themselves as “very religious” have an average IQ of 97 during adolescence.

I’m now fighting an urge to start quoting Devo and the Church of the Sub-Genius on the virtues of MUTANTS! But yeah.

But music from the 18th and 19th centuries doesn’t just sound different now than on the original instruments; some of it can’t even be played as written on modern pianos. One example is the double-octave glissando in the last movement of Beethoven’s “Waldstein” Sonata. With the light action and shallow key dip of a period Viennese piano you can plant your thumb and little finger on the octave and slide to the left, and there it is. Given the much heavier action and deeper key dip of a modern piano, if you tried that today you’d dislocate something. Every pianist has a dodge for that passage. It’s said that before the glissando Rudolf Serkin would discreetly spit on his fingers.

The prime example of what I’m talking about is perhaps the most famous piece ever written: Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata. Hector Berlioz called its murmuring, mournful first movement, “one of those poems that human language does not know how to interpret.” At the beginning, Beethoven directs the performer to hold down the sustain pedal through the whole first movement, so the strings are never damped. With the pianos of Beethoven’s time, on which the sustain of the strings was shorter than today, the effect was subtle, one harmony melting into another. On a modern piano, with its longer sustain, the effect of holding the pedal down would be a tonal traffic jam. Today you have to fake the effect, and it never quite works as intended.

You really owe it to yourself to check out the side-by-side audio comparisons in the story. It’s pretty whoah!

But in 2001, University of Michigan paleontologist Jeff Wilson, took a second look at the fossils. The team then recognized they had actually found a snake coiled around a broken egg, with a hatchling and two other eggs nearby. The findings appeared Mar. 1 in Public Library of Science Biology.

The newly discovered species of snake, Sanajeh indicus, measures about 11.5 feet long. The hatchlings, part of a group called titanosaurs, measured about a foot and a half long. Titanosaurs were the largest animal to ever walk on land, with adults that could reach up to 100 feet long.

Unlike modern snakes, S. indicus lacked jaw joints that allowed it to open its mouth incredibly wide, so it relied on its large overall body size to prey on the fledgling dinosaurs. Luckily for the snake, the titanosaur hatchlings had soft skeletons that “may have been somewhat collapsible, so you can fold their ribs up a bit and get them in your mouth,” Wilson said.

It’s likely a slow-rising flood or a storm caused adult titanosaurs to flee, abandoning their nests. The snake then slithered into the nest.

Given the genetic similarity, of course, they probably tasted like chicken.

Hopes are now pinned on firms like Chang-Diaz’s Texas-based Ad Astra Rocket Company.

“In the early days… NASA support for the project was rather minimal because the agency did not emphasize advanced technologies as much as it’s doing now,” Chang-Diaz told AFP.

NASA was focused instead on the series of Apollo missions that delivered men to the moon for the first, and so far last, times.

“They were mesmerized by the Apollo days and lived in the Apollo era for 40 years, and they just forgot developing something new,” he said.

Chang-Diaz, 60, hopes that “something” is a non-chemical rocket that eventually allow for a manned trip to Mars — long the Holy Grail for Apollonians.

His rocket would use electricity to transform a fuel — likely hydrogen, helium or deuterium — into plasma gas that is heated to 19.8 million degrees Fahrenheit (11 million degrees Celsius). The plasma gas is then channeled into tailpipes using magnetic fields to propel the spacecraft.

It’s an interesting way to look at the issue, that’s for sure. I just can’t help but think there must be a catch….

“I think that a group of small pterosaurs was feeding together near a pond or near a lake,” lead author Yuong-Nam Lee told Discovery News, adding “there are lots of feeding beak marks.”

…

For the latest study, accepted for publication in the journal Cretaceous Research, Lee and his colleagues focused on the pterosaur tracks. The scientists identified a total of 64 imprints made by five to six individuals that “show a clear quadrupedal gait pattern” with feet bearing curved “hook-like sharp” claws.

“The high density of the tracks suggest gregarious behavior, but the random orientation of the trackways does not show that they were moving in the same direction as a herd,” Lee said.

He and his team instead think the pterosaurs and birds randomly gathered to feed. The eating marks consist of “small round depressions on the slab,” possibly where the animals repeatedly pecked away for food.

Of course, now that folks think they weren’t so leathery all over, the differences between warblers and pterosaurs might be less obvious. But still, it’s quite an image.