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In 2010, Zim Rogers was waiting to hear from his bosses about whether he would be promoted. Rogers, who works in global securities, said that instead of getting a better job, he was fired after a cursory Google search turned up an 11-year-old mug shot and records in Florida of an arrest on suspicion of drunk driving and driving without a license – charges that were later reduced to misdemeanors and dismissed, his attorney said.

The Congressional agenda for 2014 includes science issues with far-reaching implications for an array of issues including public health, job growth, pharmaceutical research and energy, according to an article in Chemical & Engineering News, the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society. The mid-term elections occurring this fall, however, promise to complicate progress on key legislative efforts, already stymied by a bitter partisan atmosphere.

The thyroid hormone thyroxine, which controls our day-to-day activity and was previously believed to remain at a constant level in the blood, actually fluctuates as a result of a protein which modifies the release of the hormone depending on body temperature, new research reveals. The research was published today, 29 January, in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

(Phys.org) —Initial results from experiments conducted in the Santa Monica Mountains by a botanist at the University of California, Riverside and her colleagues indicate that high levels of nitrogen may adversely impact native plants and, by extension, increase the risk of wildfire.

A team of scientists from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles and the University of California at Davis describe ten new species of Temnothorax ants, doubling the number of species of this genus in California. What makes this discovery even more special is that each described specimen is linked to the AntWeb database by a unique identifier.

“When they are healthy, they look like tiny spheres; when they are malignant, they appear as cubes” stated Giuseppe Legname, principal investigator of the Prion Biology Laboratory at the Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA) in Trieste, when describing prion proteins. Prions are “misfolded” proteins that cause a group of incurable neurodegenerative diseases, including spongiform encephalopathies (for example, mad cow diseases) and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease

A key objective of Europe’s research and innovation policy is to take discoveries and breakthroughs from the lab and into the market place. A good example of this is the ECOPROT project, which aims to industrialise an innovative procedure for producing corrosion-protecting environmentally friendly coatings for aluminium and magnesium alloys, to be used in the aeronautics market.

Tall buildings, bridges and other long-period structures in Greater Vancouver may experience greater shaking from large (M 6.8 +) earthquakes than previously thought due to the amplification of surface waves passing through the Georgia basin, according to two studies published by the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America (BSSA). The basin will have the greatest impact on ground motion passing over it from earthquakes generated south and southwest of Vancouver.

At the beginning of each year an array of awards are given in numerous industries to the top performers of the prior year. In the arts, Cate Blanchett won a Golden Globe last week for her performance in Blue Jasmine, and in sport, Cristiano Ronaldo won the Ballon d’Or – awarded annually to the best performing soccer player – after a fantastic year with Real Madrid and Portugal.

A breakthrough using data from the Gaia-ESO project has provided evidence backing up theoretically predicted divisions in the chemical composition of the stars that make up the Milky Way’s disc – the vast collection of giant gas clouds and billions of stars that give our Galaxy its ‘flying saucer’ shape.