Culture

What happens if you deprive a group of 7 and 8 year olds of computers, television and games consoles for two weeks?

Psychologist and head of the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Leicester, Professor Barrie Gunter, has been working with the BBC Panorama team to find out.

New studies show that iron, the principal constituent of the innermost parts of the earth’s core, becomes unusually ‘soft’ at the extreme pressures and temperatures that prevail there. The findings enhance our possibility of understanding the innermost parts of the earth and how earthquakes occur.

The discovery of small perforated sea shells, in the Cave of Pigeons in Taforalt, eastern Morocco, has shown that the use of bead adornments in North Africa is older than thought. Dating from 82 000 years ago, the beads are thought to be the oldest in the world.

As adornments, together with art, burial and the use of pigments, are considered to be among the most conclusive signs of the acquisition of symbolic thought and of modern cognitive abilities, this study is leading researchers to question their ideas about the origins of modern humans.

Samuel Isaac Weissman, a professor and chemist who helped develop the first atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project, has died, his wife said Friday. He was 94.

Weissman died Tuesday in St. Louis. His wife, Jane Loevinger, said a cause of death was not known.

Weissman's work with lasers and resonant energy transfer methods at the University of California at Berkeley was cut short when he became one of the first scientists to arrive in Los Alamos, N.M., to work on the Manhattan Project during World War II.

Great news for imbibers. A new study suggests that alcohol may protect against rheumatoid arthritis and more of it is better than less. The study says three glasses of wine, for example, has positive effects but 10 glasses a week is even better.

It may sound counterintuitive to use a microbial protein to improve water quality but some bacteria are doing just that to protect themselves from potentially toxic nanoparticles in their own environments, and clean up crews of the future could potentially do the same thing on a larger scale.

A method for increasing plants’ tolerance to salt stress and thus preventing stunted growth and even plant death has been developed. The method has significant consequences for dealing with soil salinization, which is an acute problem for a wide range of crops in many regions of the world. Magnified photo at left shows the invasion of heavy oxidation (green bubbles) in the membrane of a wild, stressed, salt-sensitive plant.