LiveScience pulls the cover back on another battle of the sexes with a study that shows men and women dream differently:

Parker corroborated participants’ dreams with actual life experiences and found that the anxieties about past occurrences reoccur many times as “emblem” dreams.

“It is these emblem dreams that are particularly significant,” Parker said. “If women are asked to report [...]

Wired’s Danger Room blog now has me imagining what it would be like to come under attack from a buzzing swarm of remote-controlled rhinoceros beetles:

Researchers hooked a series of six electrodes up to the brain and muscles of the insect. Then, during a demonstration at the MEMS 2009 academic conference in Sorrento, Italy, “they equipped the beetle with a [...]

Not dinosaurs, but mammoths. I’d like to ride a mammoth. Wouldn’t you? New Scientist teases us with the possibility we can soon ride mammoths… or race glyptodons… or watch saber-tooth tigers from a safe distance:

Even in ideal conditions, though, no genetic information is likely to survive more than a million years – so dinosaurs are out – and [...]

PhysOrg reveals the high cost of gridlock. All that congestion blocks job growth as well as cars:

A new UC Irvine study found that places with sluggish commutes – usually an indication of economic prosperity – tend to have slower subsequent job growth. The findings suggest that more efficient public infrastructure projects, while costly, can spur local economic growth.

…

Kent [...]

Click to embiggen.

On Mars, the polar ice caps grow and shrink with the seasons, just like on Earth.

But unlike Earth, the Martian ice cap is made of CO2.

Image from the Electron Microscopy Unit of the USDA Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, captured as part of an experiment in filming Martian frost.

I’m blowing this month’s deadline in a big way, I think – moving out of my house this week. Many things in boxes. Phone & internet going down.

But the finished thing should be interesting. And a penitential cover song about science. Not sure which to choose, so if anyone has any ideas, please let me know!

SciAm launches a new volley in the war on drugs – specifically an exotic plant known to some as “Psychotria.” On the street, it’s likely to be called “java” or “joe” and, according to a study in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, the popular, bitter brew can trigger hallucinations:

…[C]ollege students they studied said they sometimes heard faux voices [...]

Tel Aviv researchers are revolutionizing urban design, PhysOrg.com reports, by designing cities for rats. Normally thought of as vermin, the critters can navigate the street plans to see the rat sights, take in a few rat shows….

Instead of using humans as guinea pigs, the scientists went to their nearby zoo and enlisted lab rats to determine the functionality of [...]

NASA likes listening to space, because it’s kind of noisy up there. Somewhere in the background there are echoes of the Big Bang, and if we can decipher those, we’ll know a lot about how the universe came to be. But when the scientists at a listening post in Palestine, Texas, sent up a balloon to hear what it could [...]