The Guild of Scientific Troubadours

Rugby players will have one more reason to sneer at American football players, if ABC News is right about this new football helmet. It doesn’t just protect players’ heads. … Read the rest “Smart Helmet for Smarter Football”

The idea that humans can somehow be unconsciously yanked around by pheromones – invisible, odorless, airborne chemicals – tends to make a lot of scientists guffaw and back… Read the rest “Stripper Experiment Finds Invisible Mating Signals”

Like it hot? Sure you do. Nature reveals how hot peppers can make anaesthetics work more potently – and more selectively – by “opening the doors” of pain-sensing… Read the rest “Sensitive Spice.”

Nature brings troubling news from the saving endangered species front. A study has shown that fish raised in captivity really don’t do well in the wild:

“What’s starkly

Marketplace listeners may have heard yesterday evening’s story about the Cuban health non-crisis. Contrary to what you might expect from the western hemisphere’s last … Read the rest “Poverty: It’s for your own good.”

I remember “glassteel” being one of those fabulous, fictional substances that showed up a lot in sci-fi novels when I was growing up – the fundamental material for bubbleships… Read the rest “Glassteel. Or something like it.”

Scientific American toasts the bountiful benefits of beer drinking as a brain booster:

“There are human epidemiological data of others indicating that mild [to] moderate drinking

That’s what Science Daily says. They’re reporting on the discovery by Lidia Morawska of the University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, that particles given off by … Read the rest “Your printer is bad for you.”

New Scientist talks about a… thing in space. It’s not an asteroid. It’s not a comet. It’s somehow both:

It has been officially designated as a short-period comet,

Pope Benedict XVI is hosting the Vatican’s second astronomical conference in seven years, reports the BBC:

Father Jose Funes, the head of the Vatican Observatory, said exciting

Nature unveils the unseen world of songbirds:

They injected one tracer into the part of the forebrain known to be the only active area when birds orient themselves (known as Cluster N), and

PhysOrg reports on a Northwestern University research team that’s found evidence linking Alzheimer’s disease to brain insulin:

They have shown that a toxic protein found

Science Daily reports on a veterinarian, Janice A. Dye, who might have found the cause of feline hyperthyroidism, an epidemic that’s been afflicting cats for nearly three decades.… Read the rest “Common flame redardant could be killing cats.”