Science & Technology

Most people understand, or at least loosely grasp the idea of our brains’ functions in everyday life. The brain regulates our heartbeat, our breathing, pain and emotional responses and contains the genetic blueprint for our personalities – the “nature” that determines how “nurture” is interpreted.

One of my favorite stories about scientific mystery involves a flock of pigeons. Pigeon poop, to be exact.

The first thing to greet a visitor to Jeff Ross-Ibarra’s office is the corn. Ross-Ibarra, a plant geneticist at UC Davis, keeps 50 or so dried corncobs on a shelf by the door, arrayed in a neat grid that stretches from wall to wall. But what’s more impressive than the quantity is the variety: there are long cobs, short ones, red, pink, black, white, pointy, smooth, pinecone-shaped and log-shaped ones, a popcorn cob and even some grassy stalks that look like weeds with tiny kernels buried in hard shells. And these stunningly diverse ears all belong to a single species. All of them, even the round black ear and the popcorn, could interbreed.

Take a minute, breathe deeply and clear absolutely everything out of your mind. Breathe in. Breathe out. Feel the breath as it passes through your nostrils and ascends into your nose.

In new experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland, researchers work to recreate the first microseconds after the Big Bang. They want to see how the energy of particles are distributed around the universe. These particles make all matter we see – from the solar system to deli sandwiches.

Never known why you were so inclined to liking those red state Republicans or those blue state Democrats? Well, the answer could be in your genes.

U-G-L-Y? Science can fix that.

The system that produces stress-managing hormones in young rats is easily disrupted with binge doses of alcohol, finds a new study from Loyola University of Chicago. In rats, too much booze caused hormone disruptions and led to “behavioral and/or mood disorders in adulthood,” stated the report.

On Aug. 5, 2005, Lee Seung Sop, a middleaged South Korean man, went into cardiac arrest due to exhaustion after playing the computer real-time-strategy game, Star Craft for nearly 50 hours straight. On Oct. 20, 2007, Ohio teen Daniel Petric shot both of his parents in the head after they took away his copy of Halo 3.

One out of every seven women in the U.S. will get breast cancer over a 90-year lifespan, reports BreastCancer.org. While the disease is rare in college-age students, women under 40 do account for 7 percent of breast cancer cases, according to the American Cancer Society.

It was over 20 hours of coach-seated travel from Sacramento International to the Nairobi airport. That meant about five movies, one and a half books, one hour socializing/eating and six hours of sleep.

The New York Botanical Garden has just carved and displayed the world’s largest pumpkin. The pumpkin weighs 1,811 pounds, or 10 pounds less than the entire cast of “Thintervention With Jackie Warner.”