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By asking peers to decide who deserves the most government aid--instead of using empirical measurements--money can have more lasting effects. When governments and NGOs plan on giving assistance to the most needy, how do they know who needs the most assistance? It's a question people are at great pains to answer, yet social welfare programs around the world are still plagued by error and abuse

Plants need water to live, but exactly how much? Scientists have built a simulator to figure out how to far we can push crops before they die of thirst, in preparation for a hotter climate. It's a research project that seems particularly fitting for this year, when Texas has suffered (and continues to suffer) through the worst drought year on record.

(PhysOrg.com) -- When generating entanglement between two objects, physicists typically try to minimize the objects’ interactions with the environment, since this interaction causes decoherence. But contrary to this thinking, scientists in a new study have experimentally demonstrated that dissipation caused by interaction with the environment can continuously generate entanglement between two macroscopic objects (two ensembles of cesium atoms containing about 1 trillion atoms all together).

(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers utilizing high-brightness x-rays at the U.S.

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(Hint: You're already doing it just by reading this.) Here's a novel way to increase productivity: Try browsing the Internet.

Self-control--the ability to regulate our attention, emotions and behaviors--emerges in childhood and grows throughout life, but the skill varies widely among individuals. Past studies have reported that self-control is partially inherited and partially learned and that those with less self-control are more likely to be unemployed, en

(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers have fabricated a fluidic antenna that can change its shape, and therefore the frequency at which it resonates, in response to pressure in a controlled and predictable manner. Shape-changing antennas like this one could be used as sensors, as well as offer new routes of fabricating stimuli-responsive electronics that change their function on demand.

Physicists Moti Fridman and colleagues at Cornell University have successfully demonstrated a so-called time cloaking device that is able to “hide” time for 15 trillionths of a second. In a paper published on arXiv, the researchers describe how they were able to cause light passing through a fiber optic cable to compress, than decompress, causing a hole or void to exist, long enough for there to be a lag between the two.

Escaped GM salmon could breed and pass on their genes in the wild--and those genes could cause weak salmon that eventually die off. The GM salmon companies say they have a solution to keep their fish sterile, but remember: Nature finds a way

(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have created a tunable superconducting circuit on a chip that can place a single microwave photon (particle of light) in two frequencies, or colors, at the same time.

Whoops. Diet soda might have no calories, but that doesn't keep it from growing your waistline. A new study finds that diet drinkers might be even worse off than regular soda drinkers.

A new study says that BPA exposure might make men less attractive to the opposite sex--if we're anything like deer mice. Which it turns out, we might be. BPA has already been linked to breast cancer, early puberty, and infertility.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers at Daresbury science park in Britain have offered a glimpse into what might be the future of nuclear energy production by showcasing a scaled down particle accelerator; one, that when combined with others just like it, could produce nuclear energy based on thorium, rather than uranium. Dubbed the Electron Machine with Many Applications (EMMA), the accelerator, a much smaller version of the kind used in physics research, such as the Large Hadron Collider, could be used to provide an accelerated beam necessary for the type of nuclear reaction used in a theoretical thorium plant.

People love to prognosticate about how the world will power itself in the future. But only one person can be right. Here's some of the possible ways the next 50 years might turn out.