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When bombs and bullets left 37 dead during Friday prayers at a mosque in Pakistan, earlier this month, the insurgency was using the element of surprise. Unpredictability is the hallmark of modern insurgent attacks such as this one. However, the likelihood of such events, their timing and strength can now be estimated and managed before occurring, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Miami. - A Roy from Bookmarklet

At the moment PLA is usually made in two stages. First, a source of starch or sugar, which could be an agricultural by-product, is fermented to produce lactic acid—the same substance made by the body during exercise, only in this case it comes from the bacteria exercising themselves in the fermentation process. In the second stage, lactic-acid molecules are linked into long chains, or polymers, in chemical-reaction vessels, to produce PLA. What Dr Lee and his colleagues have succeeded in doing, as they report in Biotechnology and Bioengineering, is to produce PLA directly, in a one-stage process, in bacteria. No chemical “post processing” is required. Their bacterial platform is E. coli, the workhorse species of microbial genetics. But their version has had genes from several other bacteria spliced into it. One comes from a bug called Clostridium propionicum, another from a species of Pseudomonas, and two more from Cupriavidus necator. Some of these genes, moreover, have been souped... more... - A Roy from Bookmarklet

"What economists have to say about mitigating climate change" - A Roy from Bookmarklet

Virgin Media is set to delve into users' traffic looking for copyright infringement, in the online equivalent of opening your post -- and not telling you. It's the first ISP to try deep packet inspection with the controversial Detica CView technology, which will ascertain levels of illegal music file sharing across the Virgin network. The trial will see Virgin monitoring 40 per cent of its customers, but none of these customers will be informed whether they are being checked out. Virgin insist that any data accumulated will be anonymous. - A Roy from Bookmarklet

From the discovery of new ghostsharks to a potential new technique for mass production of solar panels, 2009 wasn't all bad news for the environment. See what experts list as major wins for the year. - A Roy from Bookmarklet

"Could meat grown in a laboratory be the answer to the problem of the vast amounts of greenhouse gases emitted by farm animals? Scientists at Eindhoven University are working on growing artificial meat from animal stem cells. They think laboratory-grown meat could be on sale within years. Mark Post is Professor of Tissue Engineering at Eindhoven University. The BBC's Claire Bolderson asked him how it works?" - A Roy from Bookmarklet

We all know that effective communication is an essential skill in science. The ability to write in such a way that the reader is able, with the minimum possible effort, to grasp clearly what you are trying to say is a skill we rightly spend many hours perfecting. Sadly, much less attention is often paid to visual literacy – the art of preparing scientific figures - A Roy

When you bought PCs for your lab, they almost certainly arrived already set up with an operating system. But an operating system isn’t enough to get everything done. You need to buy applications and then things can start getting expensive. What about using free software? - A Roy

There is more to being green than driving a Prius and buying local produce. Duncan Clark sheds further light on the eco-friendly messages we've come to take for granted - A Roy from Bookmarklet

IBM’s Dawn Blue Gene/P Supercomputer Models a Cat Brain… What’s Next? - A Roy from Bookmarklet

The standards by which we judge the year's greatest innovations are simple. The objects don't necessarily need to be beautiful (although some, like the all-glass TKTS building in Times Square, certainly are). They don't have to be eco-friendly (although the packaging made of biodegradable fungus certainly is). They don't even have to be difficult to build (with all due respect to the telescope designed to find Earth-like planets). They just have to push past what we thought was possible just twelve months ago. And the following 100 innovations have all blown us away, beginning with the headliner, our product of the year: something so simple yet so smart, with the ability to improve countless lives. Please enjoy the full list here on our special Best of What's New site, arranged by category, each with its own Grand Award Winner and packed with additional videos and photos. - A Roy from Bookmarklet

"Cell Metab. 10, 379–391 (2009) Nematode worms fed on a diet spiked with glucose die about 20% earlier than those consuming just the bacterium Escherichia coli. Cynthia Kenyon and her colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco, found that dietary glucose inhibits the DAF-16 and HSF-1 proteins, which are known to lengthen nematode lifespan. This in turn lowers the activity of the gene aqp-1, which codes for a glycerol channel, suggesting that glucose shortens lifespan by affecting glycerol metabolism. Worms consuming glycerol also died earlier. The authors think that the worms metabolize glucose into glycerol, which then initiates life-shortening processes." - A Roy from Bookmarklet

Sunlike stars that harbor planets are low on lithium, according to a recent study that may offer a new tool in the hunt for planets beyond our solar system. - A Roy from Bookmarklet

"The FOXP2 gene is implicated in the development of human speech and language. A comparison of the human and chimpanzee FOXP2 proteins highlights the differences in function in the two species." - A Roy from Bookmarklet

"New research at Yale University has provided the strongest evidence yet that humans are evolving – and suggests that women of the future will be shorter, heavier, and healthier, and will have children for longer." - A Roy from Bookmarklet

"Richardson suspected that behind the mathematical complexity of the atmosphere lay a far simpler reality - if only we looked at it the right way. Now an international team of researchers analysing signals from satellites, aircraft and ground-based stations have found clear evidence that Richardson's intuition was right and that the complexity of the atmosphere could really be an illusion. The results point to a new view of the atmosphere as a vast collection of cascade-like processes, with large structures the size of continents breaking down to feed ever-smaller ones, right down to zephyrs of air no bigger than a fly. The implications promise to transform the way we predict everything from tomorrow's local weather to the changing climate of the entire planet. "We may never be able to view the atmosphere and climate in the same way again," says team member Shaun Lovejoy of McGill University in Montreal, Canada. "Rather than seeing them as so complex that only equally complex numerical models can make sense of them, we're seeing a kind of scale-by-scale simplicity."" - A Roy from Bookmarklet

"Unprecedented data volumes are driving businesses to look at alternatives to the traditional relational database technology that has served us well for over thirty years. Collectively, these alternatives have become known as NoSQL databases. The fundamental problem is that relational databases cannot handle many modern workloads. There are three specific problem areas: scaling out to data sets like Digg's (3 TB for green badges) or Facebook's (50 TB for inbox search) or eBay's (2 PB overall); per-server performance; and rigid schema design.'" - A Roy from Bookmarklet

"How and when did religion arise? In the 11th essay in Science's series in honor of the Year of Darwin, Elizabeth Culotta explores the human propensity to believe in unseen deities. No consensus yet exists among scientists, but potential answers are emerging from both the archaeological record and studies of the mind itself. Some researchers, exploring religion's effects in society, suggest that it may boost fitness by promoting cooperative behavior. And in the past 15 years, a growing number of researchers have followed Darwin's lead and explored the hypothesis that religion springs naturally from the normal workings of the human mind. This new field, the cognitive science of religion, draws on psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience to understand the mental building blocks of religious thought." - A Roy from Bookmarklet

""The New York Times' Well blog reports that 'for some time, researchers have been finding that people who exercise don't necessarily lose weight.' A study published online in September 2009 in The British Journal of Sports Medicine was the latest to report apparently disappointing slimming results. In the study, 58 obese people completed 12 weeks of supervised aerobic training without changing their diets. The group lost an average of a little more than seven pounds, and many lost barely half that. How can that be?"" - A Roy from Bookmarklet

TwitCritics leverages the constant flow of positive and negative movie references on Twitter to give a peek at public opinion on what's playing at theaters. By cataloging references to currently playing movies according to negative or positive wording within tweets, TwitCritics builds an index of movie popularity. Clicking on a movie gives you a view of the movie poster, the current rank, and a list of the most recent tweets related to it. The system isn't perfect of course, if you send out a tweet that says "I love cheese. I wouldn't see 'The Box' again anytime soon." it can throw the system off. Thankfully TwitCritics has a simple feedback mechanism for reporting inaccurate rankings—although from our casual browsing of movie reviews, the system seems accurate enough to give you a solid overview of public opinion on current movies. Have a favorite way to get a sense of what movies are worth buying a ticket for? Let's hear about it in the comments. TwitCritics [via MakeUseOf]" - A Roy from Bookmarklet

Oral sex is widely used in human foreplay, but rarely documented in other animals. Fellatio has been recorded in bonobos Pan paniscus, but even then functions largely as play behaviour among juvenile males. The short-nosed fruit bat Cynopterus sphinx exhibits resource defence polygyny and one sexually active male often roosts with groups of females in tents made from leaves. Female bats often lick their mate's penis during dorsoventral copulation. The female lowers her head to lick the shaft or the base of the male's penis but does not lick the glans penis which has already penetrated the vagina. Males never withdrew their penis when it was licked by the mating partner. A positive relationship exists between the length of time that the female licked the male's penis during copulation and the duration of copulation. Furthermore, mating pairs spent significantly more time in copulation if the female licked her mate's penis than if fellatio was absent. Males also show postcopulatory... more... - A Roy from Bookmarklet

"Conserve soil and energy and protect air and water quality. The most popular GE crops are immune to herbicides used to kill weeds. Eliminating the need for repeated plowing to control weeds has encouraged the adoption of minimum tillage practices by farmers, which reduces soil erosion and fuel use. Consequently, GE crops cut greenhouse gas emissions by the equivalent of taking over 6 million cars off the road in 2006. And less eroded soil and fertilizer in waterways improves water quality. Check. • Minimize use of toxics. The most popular herbicide used with the GE crops mentioned above replaces others that are three times as toxic and persist twice as long in the environment. Another major GE trait is insect resistance conferred by Bt proteins from a bacterium that deter or kill specific groups of worms that eat crops. In its sprayed form, Bt is approved for organic crops. In its GE crop form, it reduced global insecticide use by 300 million pounds between 1996 and 2006 (a 30%... more... - A Roy from Bookmarklet

"The UK medicines regulator has granted its first licence to a homeopathic remedy under controversial new rules allowing complementary therapies to make medicinal claims. The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has granted an arnica homeopathic product a licence for the relief of sprains or bruising. Experts say that it contains zero active ingredients and condemned the decision as a “cynical mockery of evidence-based medicine”." - A Roy from Bookmarklet

"“Indications are limited to the relief or treatment of minor symptoms or minor conditions, ie, symptoms or conditions which can ordinarily and with reasonable safety be relieved or treated without the supervision or intervention of a doctor. “Indications for serious conditions are prohibited.” - Nils Reinton

"Venice, Italy is sinking. To save it, Rachel Armstrong says we need to outgrow architecture made of inert materials and, well, make architecture that grows itself. She proposes a not-quite-alive material that does its own repairs and sequesters carbon, too." - A Roy from Bookmarklet

"Forget about the hybrid auto -- Shai Agassi says it's electric cars or bust if we want to impact emissions. His company, Better Place, has a radical plan to take entire countries oil-free by 2020." - A Roy from Bookmarklet

"Plugging Into the Sun Sunlight bathes us in far more energy than we could ever need—if we could just catch enough." - A Roy from Bookmarklet

"Readability2 is based on Readability, but goes even further in the stream lining process, removing absolutely everything—logos, print buttons, etc.—and leaving only the actual images from the article you're reading, plus the text, of course. One of the nifty features is that Readability2 keeps all the markup code in the body of the article, which makes for easy cutting and pasting." - A Roy from Bookmarklet

"Canonical will release the latest version of the open-source operating system Ubuntu this Thursday, and we look at how it stacks up against Windows 7" - A Roy from Bookmarklet

By the end of the century the Earth could be more than 6 degrees hotter than it is today. This slideshow demonstrates what could happen to our planet as each degree is reached if we don't act now to stop our carbon emissions. - A Roy from Bookmarklet

"Over the last 100 years, the way we visualize and understand the complexity of the brain has evolved" - A Roy from Bookmarklet