Culture

American college students today are civically and politically more engaged than they are commonly given credit for, and more likely to know the name of their elected representatives than the winners of "American Idol", according to the "National Survey of Civic and Political Engagement of Young People" conducted by Tufts University.

Earth's polar regions. These clouds have grown brighter and more prevalent in recent years and some scientists suggest that changes in these clouds may be the result of climate change.

The first opportunity for launch is on Wednesday, April 25 from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., aboard a Pegasus launch vehicle.

The rich don't get richer -- at least not in laboratory games. According to a new study of behavioral economics, published in the April 12, 2007 issue of Nature, people will spend their own money to make the rich less rich and the poor less poor. They do so without any hope of personal gain, acting, it seems, out of a taste for equality and sense of fair play.

Some believe it is just a figment of overactive imaginations. But evidence is growing that the so-called "axis of evil" – a pattern apparently imprinted on the radiation left behind by the big bang – may be real, posing a threat to standard cosmology.

A Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist says transferring large data files, such as movies and music, over the Internet could be sped up significantly if peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing services were configured to share not only identical files, but also similar files.

Society’s disapproval of alcohol, tobacco and gambling means that some investors -- mostly public institutions -- lose out while other investors gain on these undervalued “sin stocks,” according to a study conducted by the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia.

Sauder Prof. Marcin Kacperczyk and co-author Prof. Harrison Hong of Princeton University analyzed stock markets and the impact they feel from society’s framework of morals, traditions and laws.

People watching the Super Bowl who saw how much they had already eaten -- in this case, leftover chicken-wing bones -- ate 27 percent less than people who had no such environmental cues, finds a new Cornell study.

The difference between the two groups -- those eating at a table where leftover bones accumulated compared with those whose leftovers were removed -- was greater for men than for women.

The 11,000 members of three scientific societies with its roots in agriculture have been closely watching the reports coming out of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Most people want to be normal. So, when we are given information that underscores our deviancy, the natural impulse is to get ourselves as quickly as we can back toward the center.

Marketers know about this impulse, and a lot of marketing makes use of social norms. This is especially true of campaigns targeting some kind of public good: reducing smoking or binge drinking, for example, or encouraging recycling. The problem with these campaigns is that they often do not work. Indeed, they sometimes appear to have the opposite of their intended effect.

As the United States looks to alternate fuel sources, ethanol has become one of the front runners. Farmers have begun planting corn in the hopes that its potential new use for corn will be a new income source. What many don't realize, is the potential for other crops, besides corn, to provide an alternate energy source to fossil fuels. Scientists studied the greenhouse gas emissions and bioenergy of corn, hybrid poplar, switchgrass, and other crops to determine the efficiency of various biocrops in terms of energy consumption and energy output.

Henry Ford has long been heralded as the father of modern mass automotive production.

However, a controversial new paper by two Cardiff University researchers suggests that history may have got the wrong man. Dr Paul Nieuwenhuis and Dr Peter Wells of the Centre for Automotive Industry Research, Cardiff Business School, suggest it was Edward G Budd of Philadelphia whose development of the pressed steel car body truly developed mass production as it is known today.

Dr Alwyn Ruddock, a former reader in history at the University of London, was the world expert on John Cabot's discovery voyages from Bristol to North America (1496-98). What she was said to have found out about these voyages looked set to re-write the history of the European discovery of America. Yet, when Dr Ruddock died in December 2005, having spent four decades researching this topic, she ordered the destruction of all her research.

The story of some violent historic earthquakes may need to be revisited, according to a study published in the April issue of the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America (BSSA). Seismologists rely on written accounts, mostly local newspaper articles, to judge how strongly the ground shook during earthquakes that predate the use of current instrumentation. Those news accounts have proven to be misleading, say scientists, and reliance upon them must be tempered when evaluating the size of past earthquakes.

A new study coordinated by the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society and other groups found that Central Africa’s increasing network of roads – which are penetrating deeper and deeper into the wildest areas of the Congo Basin – are becoming highways of death for the little known forest elephant. The study, which appears in the journal Public Library of Science, concludes that forest elephants are severely impacted by ivory poachers who use roads to gain access into their remote jungle home.

Intimidation and threats are common throughout society, whether it’s in the school playground, sporting arena or boardroom. Threatening behaviour is equally widespread among non-human animals.

Individuals signal their superior strength to competitors to obtain food, resolve territorial disputes and acquire mates. Current theory insists that signals of strength should be honest. Surprisingly researchers have found that dishonest signals are used routinely during dominance disputes by male Australian crayfish.