WeBlogScience

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This week WBS has mostly been watching:
Jared Diamond evil? An ongoing case accuses him of — shock, horror — misrepresenting the facts, accusing a tribe in Papua New Guinea of revenge-driven acts of murder, rape and theft, and prompting a $10 million lawsuit against the New Yorker, who carried the article.
If that wasn’t [...]

By Mun-Keat Looi for the Wellcome Trust website.
Scientists have developed a new, automated way to collect blood samples, increasing the consistency of samples and reducing the need for multiple procedures.
Blood tests are common procedures in medicine and sometimes several are required over a prolonged period. Hormones, for example, fluctuate throughout the day and need multiple [...]

By Mun-Keat Looi for the Wellcome Trust website.
Our short-term memory is configured to remember angry faces better than happy or neutral ones, Trust-funded researchers have found.
Our brains are thought to use emotional connotations as a way to recall information better. Long-term memory seems to favour positive information, but the new study shows that this is [...]

By Mun-Keat Looi for the Wellcome Trust website.
Pregnant women experiencing high levels of anxiety run a higher risk of their child developing asthma, according to Trust-funded researchers.
A study by scientists at the University of Bristol has found that the higher the level of anxiety in an expectant mother, the higher the likelihood that their [...]

This week on the Nature Podcast, Kerri Smith and Adam Rutherford unzip nanotubes to make some graphene nanoribbons, challenge the idea that closely related species have similar cognitive abilities and hear about the world’s largest network of cosmic ray detectors in Argentina. All that, plus the weekly NewsChat, celebrating the life of John Maddox, former [...]