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You can resist buying a candy bar while you’re waiting in the checkout line at the grocery store—but you’ll buy any pair of shoes that are on sale. Your best friend, in contrast, wouldn’t dream of buying a pair of shoes he thinks he doesn’t need, no matter how low the price—but he can’t resist buying that same candy bar you so easily ignore.

(Phys.org)—A trio of researchers with the University of Regina and University of Western Ontario, both in Canada, has found that a history of drought in the areas that feed the Athabasca River indicates that droughts are likely in the future, perhaps putting oilsands mining in jeopardy. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, David Sauchyn, Jeannine-Marie St-Jacques, and Brian Luckman describe their study of tree rings in the area and what doing so revealed about the history of rainfall there.

It has been axiomatically accepted that the basement of a continental shelf is the offshore extension and geologically part of the same continental lithosphere. While this notion may hold true in places, our analysis of the distribution of Jurassic-Cretaceous granitoids throughout the entire eastern continental China in space and time led us to the conclusion that the basement of the Chinese continental shelf (beneath East China Sea and South China Sea) is of exotic origin geologically unrelated to the continental lithosphere of eastern China.

When it comes to climate change, it’s rare to get any good news. But a researcher who’s reported evidence in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on September 21, after more than two decades of study, has some: the loss of sea ice over Antarctic waters in some areas has led to the increased growth of creatures living on the seafloor.

(Phys.org)—Dark matter has never been seen directly, but scientists know that something massive is out there due to its gravitational effects on visible matter. One explanation for how such a large amount of mass appears to be right in front of our eyes yet completely invisible by conventional means is that the dark matter is hiding in the centers of stars.

Modern digital cameras are equipped with an impressive array of functions – from autofocus and image stabilization to panoramas and high-definition video. Recently a team of engineers from Duke University has unlocked a previously unrecognized 3D imaging capability of modern cameras by simply repurposing its existing components.

Researchers from Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) studied tweets sent between 15 and 30 June 2014 by followers of either Republican (conservatives) or Democrat (liberals) party Twitter accounts, and found that you can tell a lot about someone’s political leanings just from the words they use.

Humans are extremely choosy when it comes to mating, only settling down and having kids after a long screening process involving nervous flirtations, set-ups by friends, online matchmaking sites, awkward dates, humiliating rejections, hasty retreats and the occasional lucky strike. In the end, we “fall in love” and “live happily ever after.” But evolution is an unforgiving force – isn’t this choosiness rather a costly waste of time and energy when we should just be “going forth and multiplying?” What, if anything, is the evolutionary point of it all?

This Saturday at a conference in Quebec, Canada an international research team will present the first online data portal on global permafrost. In the Global Terrestrial Network for Permafrost researchers first collect all the existing permafrost temperature and active thickness layer data from Arctic, Antarctic and mountain permafrost regions and then make it freely available for download

Pointing and pantomime are important components of human communication but so far evidence for referential communication in animals is limited. Observations made by researchers Pamela Heidi Douglas and Liza Moscovice of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, make important contributions to this research topic: To solve social conflicts female bonobos invite other females to engage in a socio-sexual behaviour by using pointing gestures and mimicking hip swings.