Bran for your Blog

Whaddyaknow? Thursday just became a weekly science 'cap for this blog. Keeping you regular...

Enjoy (I'll try and avoid a weird font-size switch this time):

• Mossy Spirals Reveal Primitive Patterns - A close look at moss samples salvaged from the Columbia shuttle wreckage ahows growth in an "unusual pattern"; "wispy fronds in clockwise spirals".
• Motion Percerption Improves with Age - Canadian study shows that some parts of your eyesight get better with age
• Minority Rules Works with Animals - How to be the leader of the pack when your just one of the herd
• Nine More Crisis Areas for Biodiversity - Not all news is good, and in this field it problem won't be getting better
• Breathing to Avoid Oxygen - The weird world of bugs
• Robot Wars - and no we are NOT talking Craig Charles but nightmare visions of the future where man and machine wage war across the planet...
• Marine Biology:Whale fall - Continuing on from the discover of whale-bone devouring worms, deep seabed whale carcasses have no been investigated thoroughly and found to be a small teeming ecosystem of life known as a "whale fall"
• A Broken Heart Harms Your Health - Emotional heartbreak can actually break your heart, says stress studies
  

Top story of the week:

• NIH reveals open-access policy - any uni-student who knows the pain of findng the perfect article to cite on PubMed (or some other database), and then finding it is pay per view (especially with a low-resource library, and a stubborn lecturer). I doubt money-hungry grant-giving corporate sponsers and journal-toffs will go for it, but the idea of a centralised free-access science database is out there, and that can't be bad. Fight on.
  

PS - Keeping with the science theme - GEEK JOKES of all GEEK JOKES