Years of shifting and smoothing Georgia red clay paid off today, as the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) voted to allow construction of two new nuclear reactors  (pdf) at the Plant Vogtle nuclear power station near Augusta. Atlanta–based utility giant Southern Co. will soon have permission to complete construction and operate two AP1000 type nuclear reactors designed by Westinghouse.

Yesterday I asked: what is the best pop science song of all time? Here’s where we stand: on the shoulder of giants (with apologies to Sir Isaac).

One of those giants is Ryan Reid, our digital art guru, who not long ago did a wonderful post on 10 songs inspired by science . So one answer to the question I posed yesterday had already been posited (there must be an explanation in quantum physics for this). Which doesn’t mean it’s closed, of course.

A nearly 13-year-old skin cancer drug rapidly alleviates molecular signs of Alzheimer's diseas e and improves brain function, according to the results of a new mouse study being hailed as extremely promising. Early-stage human clinical trials could begin within months.

In the race to catch drug cheats, sports officials are turning to more sophisticated tests. Since cheaters are rarely caught red-handed, scientists devised a plan to catch them with the packaging inside their bodies. But a plasticizer is so ubiquitous in people that it has clouded the results of these blood doping tests in the world of professional cycling.

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For years, scientists have warned that climate change is taking its toll on Earth's ice, thawing not just the massive ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica but mountain glaciers and ice caps from the Andes to the Alps.

How did the zebra get its stripes? One theory holds that stripes help confuse predators. But stripes might be primarily to protect zebras from ferocious…insects. That’s according to a study in the Journal of Experimental Biology . [Ádám Egri et al., "Polarotactic tabanids find striped patterns with brightness and/or polarization modulation least attractive: an advantage of zebra stripes "]

Key concepts [More]

I m about to make an embarrassing (to science fiction fans) confession: until last week, I had never read Dune . I wasn t even aware that I was supposed to have read Dune . Nor did I know I should be embarrassed at the failure. Consider me properly chastised. Fifteen or so years too late, I have finally finished the book that calls itself on the cover of the 40 th anniversary edition science fiction s supreme masterpiece. I wouldn t go quite that far, but I will say that I was surprised by the accuracy of some of its insights into the human psyche, especially when it comes to our ability to deal with stressful situations.

In an unfamiliar dessert landscape, you are likely to panic or revert to inappropriate habits unless trained otherwise. Photo credit: Vernon Swanepoel, Creative Commons.

Biomedical research scientists send proposals to the National Institutes of Health in the hopes of being funded. A recent study of this process, published in Science by the University of Kansas’s Donna Ginther and her colleagues, revealed that proposals from black applicants are significantly less likely to be funded than proposals from white applicants. This disparity was apparent even when controlling for the applicant’s educational background, training, publication record, previous research awards and employer characteristics.

Nobel Prize winner C. V. Raman discovered in the 1920s that bombarding a substance with light excites its molecules and scatters the light in a signature pattern that can be analyzed like a fingerprint. Today Raman spectrometers are used in a variety of settings, but they tend to be large and expensive. A team led by physicist Manfred Fink of the University of Texas at Austin is developing a smaller, less expensive model that may improve earthquake detection and bring down the cost of some medical tests.

Excerpted with permission of the publisher John Wiley & Sons, Inc., from Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us , by Joe Palca and Flora Lichtman. Copyright © 2011 by Joe Palca and Flora Lichtman. This book is available at all bookstores, online booksellers and the Wiley Web site at www.wiley.com , or call 1-800-225-5945.

Champagne. Do you drink it out of a narrow flute or the broader, more shallow coupe?

The Philippine tarsier (Tarsius syrichta) makes ultrasonic calls. (Credit: Nathaniel Dominy, Dartmouth)

Let’s be honest: tarsiers look odd. Among the smallest of all primates, most species of tarsier would fit easily in the palm of your hand. They have long, slender, largely hairless tails and elongated fingers with knobby knuckles and mushroom-cap finger pads.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto/luckyraccoon

Men tend to get coronary artery disease much earlier than do women. For some men, the reason for that might be in part because of their fathers and their father’s father according to a new study , published online Wednesday in The Lancet .

Gonorrhea under a microscope. Image: courtesy of CDC/Susan Lindsley

The arms race between humanity and disease-causing bacteria is drawing to a close and the bacteria are winning. The latest evidence: gonorrhea is becoming resistant to all standard antibiotic treatment.

When large airliners approach an airport for a landing, a combination of radio signals and high-intensity lighting shows the pilot exactly where the runway is, even at night or in fog. But millions of people a year fly on smaller commercial planes, many private, that do not have such technology. The pilots of those craft must rely on less sophisticated instruments, along with their cockpit window view during landing, a situation that can be fatal in bad weather. In 2011 alone four such commercial jets crashed into terrain or an obstacle, killing 140 passengers and crew, according to avionics-maker Honeywell and aerospace research firm Ascend . The accidents are known as "controlled flight into terrain." [More]

Cancer treatment can be brutal for patients. Many of the tools we have-- chemotherapy , radiation--are big, blunt weapons that deal punishing blows to healthy tissues along with cancerous ones. So the hunt has been on for more and more finely targeted therapies that will attack malignant cells yet minimize damage to patients' bodies.

Gene therapy has markedly improved vision in both eyes in three women who were born virtually blind. The patients can now avoid obstacles even in dim light, read large print and recognize people's faces. The operation, researchers predict, should work even better in children and adolescents blinded by the same condition.

It's official. Russian scientists announced today that they have reached Antarctica's Lake Vostok, an ancient, liquid lake the size of Lake Ontario buried beneath more than 2 miles (3 kilometers) of ice for at least 14 million years.

Last month, when FirstEnergy Corp. decided to close six coal-fired power plants in its home state of Ohio and two other states, the moves became instant political ammunition for Republicans, who blamed the Obama administration's environmental regulations for the closures.

Courtesy of wovox via Flickr.

Whether you succeed at work may depend on many factors intelligence, empathy, self-control, talent and persistence, to name a few. But one determinant may outweigh many of these: how you perceive those around you. New research suggests that your own ability to get things done not to mention your success in non-work relationships is highly correlated with how you see others. Are your coworkers capable and kind, or are they, dare I say, incompetent jerks?

The latest findings about the ineffectiveness of PSA testing to screen for prostate cancer has confused many men--and their loved ones. On the one hand is the seeming chance to catch cancer early. On the other hand is the growing realization that many prostate tumors grow so slowly that they will never cause a problem in an individual's lifetime.

Last fall the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force dropped a bombshell, arguing that healthy men should stop undergoing a routine blood test as a screen for prostate cancer. An analysis of the best available evidence, it argued, had shown little or no long-term benefit from the measure--called the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test--for most men with no symptoms of the disease. Use of the screening was not saving lives. In fact, it was needlessly exposing hundreds of thousands of men who were tested and found to have prostate cancer to such common complications as impotence and urinary incontinence (from surgical removal of the prostate) and rectal bleeding (from radiation treatment). Indeed, the task force estimated that more than one million men have been treated because of PSA testing who otherwise would not have been since 1985. At least 5,000 of them died soon after treatment, and another 300,000 men suffered impotence or incontinence, or both. Instead of praise for sparing more men from suffering similar fates, however, the task force’s announcement quickly drew outrage and counterarguments from several professional medical groups, including the American Urological Association.

Americans still fall short of the recommended daily portions of fruits and vegetables. And kids are notoriously averse to veggies at the school cafeteria. So researchers tested whether visual cues of healthful foods could increase consumption at a grade school with 800 students.

Custom-designed proteins made with the aid of computers could fight chemical weapons such as nerve gas and help decontaminate toxic-waste sites, scientists say.

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It seems the general public just can't make up its mind about the existence of man-made climate change. Rather than steadily increasing or decreasing over the last decade, the U.S. public's concern over our warming planet has jumped up and down, according to Gallup polls. But what exactly is driving this seesawing of opinions on climate change?

By Jeff Tollefson of Nature magazine

When US government scientists began sampling the air from a tower north of Denver, Colorado, they expected urban smog--but not strong whiffs of what looked like natural gas. [More]

Today the two main experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, submitted the results of their latest analyses. The  new   papers  boost the case for December’s announcement of a possible Higgs signal , but let’s not get too excited.

Second in a series. Click here for part 1.

Disability advocates were seeing red after two elderly women with medical conditions were allegedly strip-searched by TSA agents at New York’s JFK airport last December. You’d have to have a pretty thick skin not to empathize with an elderly, wheelchair-bound woman having her colostomy bag frisked. But the notion of one passenger being an unlikely terrorist also belies a discomfiting flipside: another passenger being a more likely candidate.

By Carey Gillam

(Reuters) - The United States remained the primary backer of biotech crop technology in 2011, but adoption spread internationally as the total global planted area of genetically modified seeds grew 8 percent from a year ago, according to a report issued Tuesday.

Giants parade down the Canyon of Heroes after their victory in 2008. They will retrace their steps today. | Creative Commons, Photo by David Hodges. Click image for license and link.

Ed. Note: So the New York Giants won the super bowl, and there will be a parade not too far from my office today. I’m have no intention of leaving the office parade or no parade, I’m not a Giants fan and my football wounds are still a bit raw, and the crowds are a little intense but it seemed like a good time to revisit this post that I wrote following the parade for the New York Yankees in 2009 . (I’m not a fan of them either, but the parade was a novelty at the time.) Wondering how a New Yorker be a fan of anything but a New York team? I address that here .

(Adds Ukrainian death toll, Serbian power supplies)

By Irina Ivanova

By Gopal Sharma

PITHAULI, Nepal (Reuters) - In the village of Pithauli, surrounded by ripening mustard fields, a woman hauls a cow carcass on a trolley, drops it in an open field, then runs and hides in a nearby hut as dozens of vultures swoop down.

I’ve written before about the many ways that bacteria can move around. Considering that they’re just one cell long, micro-organisms have a whole range of ways to travel through their little world. Movement is useful for finding food and for changing your environment when all nearby resources have been exhausted. For bacteria that can’t move, however, or that don’t want to move, there is a second option; they can park themselves on a nearby surface and settle down to wait.

There are several advantages to this. For a start, other things like food and nutrients tend to accumulate at surfaces as well, bringing the bacteria a regular supply of food. A surface is a more stable environment, the bacteria that adhere to your teeth do so because to get swept away into the stomach is to be pulled down into a very literal lake of acid. For bacteria that form biofilms , sticking to a surface is the first stage in this process.

Several Russian news outlets are reporting that Russian scientists have successfully drilled to Antarctica's Lake Vostok , a massive liquid lake cut off from daylight for 14 million years and buried beneath 2 miles (3.7 kilometers) of ice.

By

The prototype for Google's HUD glasses has been seen, according to tech news site 9to5Google . And, supposedly they resemble Oakley's Thump glasses, which makes them look a lot like something the Terminator might wear. [More]

* Tokyo hopes to win local govts' approval -report

* Will mark first restart of reactors since March 2011 quake

Image courtesy of iStockphoto/lisegagne

Those little pursed lips and that tiny crinkled nose might not just mean that your baby isn’t a fan of pureed peas or mashed sweet potatoes. Some of the refusals to all of those “here-comes-the-airplane” attempts to feed a weaning infant might also be the child s way of saying that she or he is just not hungry.

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Anthrax courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Marcus007

The white powder that arrived in envelopes addressed to lawmakers and journalists in 2001 proved to be a deadly delivery for several people. The lethal substance spores commonly known as Anthrax (from the bacterium Bactillus anthracis ) can cause a toxic reaction in a host’s blood stream , killing cells and leading to tissue damage, bleeding and death.

This stuffed coelacanth, described by Smith in 1939, achieved worldwide fame. Source .

It was supposed to be extinct. Yet here it lay, with fins round and fleshy, scales as hard as bone and a tail unlike any living fish. “Lass, this discovery will be on the lips of every scientist in the world”, James Smith said to Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer , curator of the East London Museum. Smith had good reasons to make such a grand claim. This was a coelacanth.

People who live farther from the equator have larger eye sockets than their tropical counterparts, a new study finds. And as people inhabited higher and higher latitudes , eye socket size grew along with the northerly or southerly extent of their migrations.

PHILADELPHIA -- When the Allies needed a weapon terrible enough to end World War II, scientists devised the atomic bomb. When the Soviet Union hurled Sputnik into space, American scientists rallied to build the world's top space program.

Satellite composite showing location of Vostok within the Antarctic continent (NASA)

Two and a half miles beneath the surface of Antarctica’s central Eastern ice sheet is a body of water 160 miles by 30 miles across known as Lake Vostok , after the Vostok research station above it, built by the former Soviet Union in 1957 and now operated by Russia.

The thought of shuffling off our mortal coil can make all of us a little squeamish. But avoiding the idea of death entirely means ignoring the role it can play in determining our actions. Consider the following scenario: