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Eric Nestler, director of the Friedman Brain Institute at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City talks about his article in the December issue of Scientific American magazine, on epigenetics and human behavior, called Hidden Switches In The Mind .

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By Natasha Gilbert of Nature magazine Our last line of defence against hospital 'superbugs' is faltering, with resistance to the antibiotics usually used to tackle intractable pneumonia and urinary tract infections on the rise and spreading across European countries. The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) in Solna, Sweden, announced last week that 29 new cases of bacteria resistant to the broad-spectrum carbapenem antibiotics had been reported across a total of six European Union (EU) countries between early October 2010 and the end of March 2011. The figures coincide with the publication, on 17 November, of a European Commission strategy to tackle antibiotic resistance.

Is the northern hairy-nosed wombat (Lasiorhinus krefftii ) the most interesting endangered species in the world? Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t but it has definitely attracted the attention of the Dos Equis beer commercial spokesperson known only as “the Most Interesting Man in the World.” The television advertising icon and Dos Equis have launched an auction for a jar of what they call The Most Interesting Jam a concoction made from ingredients suggested by Facebook fans and supposedly hand-mixed by the Most Interesting Man in the World himself with all proceeds going to benefit the Wombat Foundation, an organization set up to protect the critically endangered northern hairy-nosed wombat.

In an impossible figure, seemingly real objects--or parts of objects--form geometric relations that physically cannot happen. Dutch artist M.

Help The Scripps Research Institute find a cure for drug-resistant malaria [More]

The Desceliers map of 1550. On a Renaissance map of the world, there is a small white elephant standing near the Arctic coast of Russia. How it got there is a mystery

Having a high IQ may have its drawbacks: a new study finds that highly intelligent children are more likely to try illegal drugs in their teenage and adult years. The work is published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health . [James White and G.

By Monya Baker of Nature magazine The first company to test a human embryonic stem-cell product in patients has become the first big player to bail out of the field. [More]

More than 200 tops spin in vessels half-buried in the dirt outside Stephentown, N.Y., a town near the Massachusetts state line. Inside the vessel a vacuum permits each top to rotate as many as 16,000 times per minute, despite the fact that each weighs more than one metric ton, thanks to its steel and carbon-fiber composition

Scientific papers tend to be loaded with statistics and jargon, so it is always a delightful surprise to stumble on a nugget of poetry in an otherwise technical report. So it was with a 2005 paper in the journal Development and Psychopathology , drily entitled “Biological Sensitivity to Context,” which looked at kids’ susceptibility to their family environment. The authors of the research paper, human development specialists Bruce J.

Rationality is the crowning achievement of our species.

At a recent math conference, Rouslan Krechetnikov watched his colleagues gingerly carry cups of coffee. Why, he wondered, did the coffee sometimes spill and sometimes not

In 2009 the San Francisco police arrested Lily Haskell when she allegedly attempted to come to the aid of a companion who had already been taken into custody during a peace demonstration. The authorities released her quickly, without pressing charges. But a little piece of Haskell remained behind in their database.

Mutations alter the information contained in genes. "Epigenetic" marks on genes do not affect the information but do influence gene activity, as the simplified diagrams below show