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MARIETTA, Ga. It's Monday night at the Battle & Brew, a gamer hangout in this Atlanta suburb. The crowd is slumping in chairs, ears entombed in headphones, eyes locked on flat-screen monitors and minds lost in tonight s game of choice: "The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim." To help stay alert all night, each man has an open can of "gamer fuel" inches from his keyboard

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[the following is a modified repost from Myrmecos , 2010] Image by US Army Africa, used under a Creative Commons CC-BY 2.0 license [More]

By Philip Ball of Nature magazine Charles Darwin was not a plagiarist, say two researchers who aim to refute the idea that Darwin revised his own theory of evolution to fit in with one proposed by fellow naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace. The accusation has received little support from serious historians of Darwin's life and work, who say that Darwin and Wallace came up with the theory of evolution by natural selection independently at more or less the same time

I hope you won’t object to a post not specifically on point about energy or transmission or connectivity. But I think it gets directly at how we understand those topics, so I think it’s worth mentioning.

For a century workers flocked to Dubuque, Iowa, as they raised new generations of laborers, they built houses, shops and streets that eventually covered over the Bee Branch Creek. The water gurgled through underground pipes out of sight and largely out of memory. [More]

In the words of Maite Nkoana-Mashabane * , President of the Durban UN Climate Change Conference, “ we should not let the perfect become the enemy of the good and the possible .” Given the thousands of fossil fuel-fired power plants around the world (including about 3,000 in North American alone), this good and possible likely means a future that includes coal, natural gas, and oil as primary energy resources. So, how can we use these fossil fuels in a more environmentally responsible way within practical constraints? One option could be found in the flexible operation of carbon capture and sequestration technology on the world s coal-fired power plants

Promising treatments for those blinded by an often-hereditary, retina-damaging disease are expanding throughout Europe and making their way across the pond, offering a ray of hope for the hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. left in the dark by retinitis pigmentosa . The disease--which affects about one in 4,000 people in the U.S

Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is the most commonly diagnosed psychiatric disorder in children, and is becoming a big deal in adults as well. ADHD is a pile of related symptoms, most of them dealing with motivation, impulsivity, inattention, and, you know hyperactivity (they call it ADHD for a reason). Right now, we treat ADHD with stimulants such as Ritalin and Adderall, which in low doses and when they act over a long period of time can increase focus and help people with ADHD function better

It’s December 12 th , which means if you’re 14 to 18 years old, you still have a couple of days left to enter the YouTube SpaceLab competition . [More]

Welcome to the Scientific American podcast Science Talk, posted on December 11th, 2011. I’m Steve Mirsky. Rumors are flying about the search for the long-sought Higgs boson at Europe’s Large Hadron Collider

I am here in Durban, South Africa to report on the just finished climate change negotiations. While an agreement was reached, negotiations were in doubt throughout the three final nights.

All science writers, especially those of us who cover particle physics and other fields that purport to reveal ultimate reality, hear from cranks. Pre-email, I got envelopes stuffed with manuscripts, sometimes hundreds of pages long, from people unaffiliated with any research institution known to me.

The Chasmagnathus granulatus crab leads a simple life. It spends its days burrowing for food and trying to avoid its nemesis, the seagull. But recent research has shown that despite its rudimentary brain, this crab has a highly sophisticated memory