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Hundreds of research papers are published every day worldwide. But which articles are most discussed and in which circles? To find out, Altmetric in London traced how often papers were noted in 14 digital channels, ranging from the serious (5,000 research blogs and Mendeley, an academic citation network) to the trendy (Twitter, Facebook) and everything in between (including 1,000 news outlets). Altmetric poured data for 2014 into an algorithm that created scores; the top 200 articles are mapped here....

New maps of water in the atmosphere of Mars reveal that the Red Planet might once have had enough to cover up to a fifth of the planet, researchers say. Further research to refine these maps could help guide the quest to identify underground reservoirs on Mars, the scientists added. A new NASA video describes the ancient ocean on Mars. Although the Martian surface is now cold and dry, there is plenty of evidence suggesting that rivers, lakes and seas covered the Red Planet billions of years ago....

Using a chemical that blocks the creation of memories, scientists have prevented rats from using cocaine after they had become addicted to the drug. The hope is that doctors will one day be able to give humans some version of the chemical and stop cocaine addiction in its tracks. Barry Everitt, an experimental psychologist at the University of Cambridge in England, focused his group’s efforts on proteins called NMDA-type glutamate receptors in rat brains....

By Steve Gorman LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Mountain lions in Southern California are under growing pressure from a shrinking gene pool, fragmented by highways and urban sprawl that has left the cats’ territories increasingly isolated from each other, a study published on Wednesday showed. Analysis of DNA from about 350 mountain lions, or cougars, statewide revealed that those in the Santa Ana Mountains southeast of Los Angeles are only about half as genetically diverse as more robust populations in the Rockies....

Dear EarthTalk: Aren’t orangutans seriously threatened by the cutting down of forests? – Nick Chermayeff, Greenwich, CT Deforestation is indeed the primary threat to the orangutan, a species of great ape known for its keen intelligence and the fact that it’s the largest animal to live primarily in trees. A 2007 assessment by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) predicts that orangutans will be virtually eliminated in the wild within two decades if current deforestation trends continue....

The middle of Oklahoma has become an earthquake hotspot because of the oil and gas industry—and also from powerful temblors around the world. In the area near Prague, Okla., where wastewater from oil and gas production has been injected down disposal wells for decades, a series of earthquakes broke out following the massive magnitude 8.8 earthquake off the coast of the Maule region of Chile in 2010. For months the grounds in Oklahoma periodically shook, culminating in a destructive 5....

An Egyptian man recently took the ultimate plunge for the sake of science. Setting a new Guinness World Record for the deepest scuba dive, the man dove more than 1,000 feet (305 meters) below the surface of the Red Sea. When asked why he decided to dive deeper than any person had before, Ahmed Gabr, 41, told the media that he was hoping to prove that humans could survive the conditions of deep-sea immersion, according to Guinness World Records....

An independent review of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a mammoth space-borne infrared observatory that should greatly surpass even the venerable Hubble Space Telescope in observing power, has revealed that the telescope will cost about $1.4 billion more than had been thought. And the telescope is likely to launch more than a year later than had been planned, according to the report, which was made public November 10. The seven-member review panel, convened at the request of Sen....

The Senate’s surge into Republican hands yesterday ends an eight-year hold on power in which Democrats made failing attempts to slash carbon emissions amid sharp swings in the public’s mood on climate change and growing damage from natural disasters. Seats in key states like Colorado and Iowa turned to GOP candidates who at times campaigned against the expansion of environmental protections under President Obama. The conservative wave dismantles a Democratic shield that until now had protected U....

Tests on the exhumed body of the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat have found traces of the radioactive isotope polonium-210, prompting renewed claims that he was deliberately poisoned. “The results could reasonably support the proposition that the death was the consequence of poisoning by polonium 210,” says Patrice Mangin, director of the University Center of Legal Medicine in Lausanne, Switzerland, who led the analysis. But his lengthy report on the investigations, released yesterday (PDF), is clear that the evidence offers no firm conclusions....

A glimpse at the magazine rack in any supermarket checkout line will tell you that women are frequently the focus of sexual objectification. Now, new research finds that the brain actually processes images of women differently than those of men, contributing to this trend. Women are more likely to be picked apart by the brain and seen as parts rather than a whole, according to research published online June 29 in the European Journal of Social Psychology....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Decisions are based on the way choices are framed. This is because people use emotion when making decisions, leading to some options feeling more desirable than others. For example, when given £50, we are more likely to gamble the money if we stand to lose £30 than if we are going to keep £20....

Having proved in 2004 that plugging a sensor into the human brain’s motor cortex could turn the thoughts of paralysis victims into action, a team of Brown University scientists now has the green light from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) institutional review board to expand its efforts developing technology that reconnects the brain to lifeless limbs. Brown’s BrainGate Neural Interface System—conceived in 2000 with the help of a $4....

In his first major science address since taking office, President Obama promised today to increase U.S. public and private spending to historic highs for science research and development. “I’m here today to set this goal: We will devote more than 3 percent of our GDP to research and development,” Obama said during a speech at the National Academy of Sciences. He added, “We will not just meet, but we will exceed the level achieved at the height of the space race, through policies that invest in basic and applied research, create new incentives for private innovation, promote breakthroughs in energy and medicine, and improve education in math and science....

His finalist year: 1999 His finalist project: Studying cells that attack the nervous system in multiple sclerosis What led to the project: Scott Fruhan was always fascinated by how the parts of living things worked. As an eight-year-old growing up in Newton, Mass., he used to carry around a wooden briefcase with the inscription “Scott Fruhan, entomologist”. What else would you write on a briefcase full of dead bugs? In high school, Fruhan pestered a friend’s father who ran an immunology lab focused on studying multiple sclerosis (MS) at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) to let him volunteer there....

Mort Lippmann noticed a strange phenomenon in his laboratory mice. For 14 straight days, their hearts were racing. Lippmann, a scientist at New York University who has studied the effects of air pollution for over 50 years, couldn’t explain it. During those two weeks in October, 2004, air pollution levels were lower than average at his laboratory in Tuxedo, New York, 30 miles north of New York City. But Lippmann soon learned that concentrations of tiny particles of nickel were the highest he’d ever seen....

[Editor’s Note: The following is the first chapter from Red Moon Rising, a new book from writer Matthew Brzezinski.] One after another, the big ZIS limousines pulled away from the curb. Black and burly, their whitewall tires not yet soiled by slush, the armored behemoths glided gently through the snow–three-and-a-half-ton dancers in a synchronized automotive ballet. From Central Committee headquarters on Staraya Square, the chrome-fendered procession headed east past Gorki Street and slipped under the shadow of one of the Gothic skyscrapers that Stalin had ordered built after the war....

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). Imagine you’re shopping for a new car, and the salesperson says, “Did you know, this car doesn’t just drive on the road.” “Oh?” you reply. “Yeah, you can also use it to do other things. For instance, it folds up to make a pretty good bicycle. And it folds out to make a first-rate airplane. Oh, and when submerged it works as a submarine....

If you have to make a complex decision, will you do a better job if you absorb yourself in, say, a crossword puzzle instead of ruminating about your options? The idea that unconscious thought is sometimes more powerful than conscious thought is attractive, and echoes ideas popularized by books such as writer Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling Blink. But within the scientific community, ‘unconscious-thought advantage’ (UTA) has been controversial. Now Dutch psychologists have carried out the most rigorous study yet of UTA—and find no evidence for it....

By Eugenie Samuel Reich of Nature magazineThe US Treasury has warned that if the US debt ceiling, the amount that the country may legally borrow, is not raised by 2 August, the country will not legally be able to pay all its obligations. Republican members of Congress have demanded cuts to the budget as a condition of agreeing to raise the debt ceiling and avoid a default. Both Republican and Democratic proposals would cut more than US$1 trillion in spending over a decade, amounting to a budget reduction of at least $100 billion per year....