Science & Society

It's been revealed that what Santa needs is a comfortable armchair and a fast finger to turn a 24,902 mile(a) shopping trip around the world into just 1 hour(b) spent in front of a computer, leaving Santa all rested up to do his Christmas Eve deliveries. 150 clicks are all it would take for Santa Claus to buy all the presents from across the world for a typical UK family(c). Santa need not spend £3370 on sleigh fares(d) nor travel 56 hours(e) on his famous sleigh to purchase the presents either, as he would in years past. To buy 5 gifts from around the world for a typical UK family this…

When the Nobel Committee awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize to former US Vice President Al Gore, Jr. and the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) part of their rationale was Extensive climate changes may alter and threaten the living conditions of much of mankind. They may induce large-scale migration and lead to greater competition for the earth’s resources. Such changes will place particularly heavy burdens on the world’s most vulnerable countries. There may be increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states. So saving the environment is working for…

Domestic violence is an inherent problem in Turkey, and healthcare workers are doing little to combat the prevalence of wife beating, according to research published in the online open access journal, BMC Public Health. A survey of medical personnel reveals that a lack of training and a cultural acceptance of domestic violence may prevent victims from obtaining the support they desperately require. 173 medical staff from the emergency department of a Turkish university hospital responded to a questionnaire about domestic violence. 69.0% of the female and 84.7% of the male respondents declared…

The saying goes that "time flies when you're having fun" and accident victims report events happening in slow motion as disaster occurred. But can humans really experience events at different speeds? Is time that relative? Apparently not, said researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, who studied how volunteers experience time when they free-fall 100 feet into a net below. Even though participants remembered their own falls as having taken one-third longer than those of the other study participants, they were not able to see more events in time. Instead, the longer duration was…

Vanessa Hull, 25, a Ph.D. candidate at Michigan State University, is in the snowy, remote mountains of the Sichuan Province of China--the heart of panda habitat. She's hoping to capture, collar and track up to four wild pandas using advanced global positioning systems. Along with her research gear, Hull, a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Fellow and MSU University Distinguished Fellow, is lugging a small digital video camera and a laptop computer. She's sending back video and images to add to MSU's ongoing coverage of panda habitat research. You can even e-mail questions about the…

Are those inclined towards generosity genetically programmed to behave that way? A team of researchers believes this to be true based on their latest study. Through an online task involving making a choice whether or not to give away money, the researchers found that those who chose to give away some or all of their money differed genetically from those involved in the exercise who chose not to give their money away. The scientists conducted the experiment with 203 online "players". Each player could choose to keep the equivalent of $12 he was allocated, or to give all or part of it to an…

To ensure you have a green Christmas this season, Bluewater, the UKs leading shopping center, have devised an eco-friendly scientific formula on how to wrap a Christmas present after estimating British consumers will waste over one ton of wrapping paper this Christmas (see note 1 at the bottom). Bluewater discovered that Brits continually overestimate the amount of paper they need to wrap their Christmas presents. Following this new revelation, Bluewater today reveals the mathematical solution which will hopefully put an end to unnecessary paper wastage and help those in the US also: A1 = 2…

Writing in Atoms for Peace, Energy consultant David Wood suggests that Iran's demands for nuclear power in economic and technical terms are a justified response to rapid growth in domestic energy demands and an increased dependence on oil exports for revenue. Despite its vast oil and gas reserves, years of under-investment in Iran has limited access to technology and stifled its production capacity. Indeed, Iran now relies on imports for certain refined petroleum products and natural gas. Wood argues that the development of this situation has forced Iran to consider alternative future energy…

Most of us are familiar with the mantra of how science progresses: A hypothesis can never be completely proved by any finite set of experiments but it can be falsified by a single result. In mathematical proofs, clear cut algorithms can usually be applied to prove unequivocally the falsehood of a theorem (notwithstanding Godel's incompleteness theorems :) But in real research in the physical sciences, that is not exactly how scientists process reports of experimental results. And an important reason is the way results are reported. Lets pick an example from the Open Access Beilstein Journal…

Mothers who reported sleeping five hours or less per day when their babies were six months old had a threefold higher risk for substantial weight retention (11 pounds or more) at their baby’s first birthday than moms who slept seven hours per day, according to a new study by Kaiser Permanente and Harvard Medical School / Harvard Pilgrim Health Care. The study, published in the November issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology, is the first to look at the impact of sleep deprivation on postpartum weight retention. Previous studies have looked at the effect of early postpartum sleep…