Science News

How pleasurable and desirable does this image of chocolate cake appear to you? [More]

The gold standard for certifying "green" buildings fails to place enough emphasis on human health and needs to be upgraded, according to a new report from an environmental health group. [More]

Veterans of war have been known to suffer from high incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression and traumatic brain injury in addition to any physical wounds. And a new study of thousands of U.S. Army soldiers returning from combat duty in Iraq found up to 31 percent reported symptoms of PTSD or depression as long as a year after returning from the battlefield. [More]

The disastrous deluge of BP oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico evokes the memory of a blowout more than 40 years ago that, although not a carbon copy of the Deepwater Horizon incident, remains hauntingly similar in several important ways. The 1969 Dos Cuadras Offshore Oil Field spill in the Santa Barbara Channel was an unprecedented ecological disaster at the time caused by a natural gas-induced offshore rig blowout that caught the oil and gas industry off guard and required a tremendous effort to fix. [More]

Apple will start selling the iPhone 4 in the U.S., France, Germany, Japan and the U.K. on June 24, although customers can pre-order the new gadget beginning June 15 from Apple's Web site, it was announced Monday. The cost is expected to start at $200 for the 16-gigabyte model and $300 for the 32-gigabyte, with a two-year service contract. [More]

Doctors and other health professionals working for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) might have been illegally performing research on detainees after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, according to a new report issued by the advocacy group Physicians for Human Rights. [More]

Allan Savory 's project, titled "Operation Hope," is an ongoing effort to reverse the desertification that is spreading across the world's savannas and grasslands like a disease. It is rapidly changing farmland into deserts.

What makes the effort unusual for Savory, a biologist, is his use of what he called "the most universally condemned tool in the world" -- livestock. Farming is perhaps the oldest means by which humans have affected the world's climate.

By Kristen Hays

HOUSTON (Reuters) - BP Plc said on Monday that its cap system at a seabed oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico captured 11,100 barrels of oil on Sunday, up slightly from the previous 24 hours, and the company planned to increase that amount to 20,000 barrels.

Surely if a dog is man's best friend, then dogs must also be the best buds of scientists and their pursuit of knowledge. Consider this statistic: assuming that dog ownership among scientists mirrors that of the U.S. population at large, there are just over half a million scientists who are dog owners in the U.S. alone. [More]

Our eyes swivel restlessly in their sockets during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, an aptly named period of intense dreaming that makes up 20 to 25 percent of total sleep time. Whether this fidgeting is random or serves a function has never been clear, but a new study suggests that our eyes shift their gaze to fixate on the imagined people, places and actions in our sleep dreamscape. In other words, the movements of dreaming eyes mimic those of waking eyes. [More]