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Gossip can act as a useful social shortcut--it lets you know whom to avoid without your having to learn a person’s faults the hard way. And gossip may also influence whether you notice someone in the first place, according to a study published in Science on June 17. To test whether gossip affects visual awareness, psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett of Northeastern University and her collaborators took advantage of a phenomenon called binocular rivalry.

U.S. mobile phone customers do not like spending a lot of money for their wireless gadgets. As a result many agree to restrictive contracts with AT&T, Sprint, Verizon and other wireless carriers in order to get a good deal.

Bats see with their ears. Which are highly attuned to pick up minute variations in the reflection of the sound pulses they use to echolocate. Here are some pulses, slowed down.

Erez Lieberman Aiden was an undergraduate at Princeton University in 2000 when scientists announced with great fanfare that they had sequenced the first human genome , yielding a trove of information about what happens inside every human cell. But Aiden wondered what it would be like to see what was happening inside a human cell

With the stream of accusations of child sexual abuse not losing any gusto lately, from the ever-growing charges against former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky to allegations of such behaviors by assistant basketball coach Bernie Fine, it'd be easy to assume a real upsurge in such abuse.

Rotary evaporator. Credit: Geni/Wikimedia Commons [More]

The Arctic has transformed over the last five years into a region that's warmer and greener, with larger patches of open water as sea ice recedes. [More]

(Reuters) - The Arctic zone has moved into a warmer, greener "new normal" phase, which means less habitat for polar bears and more access for development, an international scientific team reported on Thursday. [More]

Budding photographers, beware: the beauty of a serene sunset, a peaceful forest or a majestic mountain range is not sufficient to make a vacation snapshot memorable. In fact, pleasing images of landscapes or forests are often the hardest to recognize and remember later on, according to a study presented at the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in June.

WHY CRIME DROPPED In “ How New York Beat Crime ,” Franklin E. Zimring refers only incidentally to a decline since 1990 in the “percentage of the population in the most arrest-prone bracket, between 15 and 29,” in both New York and the nation.

By Ed Yong of Nature magazine In the deep ocean off the coast of Costa Rica, scientists have found a species of crab that cultivates gardens of bacteria on its claws, then eats them. The yeti crab--so-called because of the hair-like bristles that cover its arms--is only the second of its family to be discovered. [More]

What lies beneath such turbulent skies? (NASA/JPL) Gas giant planets are among the most beautiful and awe-inspiring worlds

A new variant of an influenza virus that circulates in pigs has been jumping occasionally into people, providing a surprisingly early opportunity for public health officials to test out some of the lessons learned from the 2009 H1N1 pandemic . [More]

In 2001: A Space Odyssey, astronauts Bowman and Poole conspire to shut down their ship's computer, HAL.

Milan is one of Europe’s most polluted cities.