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Journals week in review: science from Nobel Intent

Microexplosions, better flat panel displays, and how the brain manages to …

Things may have slowed down a bit now that we're in the heat of the Northern Hemisphere's summer, but the world of science and technology has continued to pump out the data faster than most of us can take it all in. Nobel Intent gives both its readers and writers the opportunity to slow down and take a careful look at whatever papers they find interesting. In case you missed any of the big stories of the past week, here's a glimpse at some of the things our regular readers enjoyed most.

LCD displays may be far more energy-efficient than their CRT ancestors, but they are absolutely terrible at getting the light to where it belongs: the eyes of the person using the computer. Less than 10 percent of the light they produce makes its way out of the display, meaning there's lots of space for improvements in energy use. The week saw research into LCDs based on telescope designs make the news pages, while improved organic LEDs were described in the science section.

A study that explored our ability to manage fears was popular with our readers, as researchers find that the ability to learn new ones and get comfortable with old ones may simply be a matter of throwing a neural switch.

Isotope ratios in individual fossils dating back hundreds of millions of years suggest that the earth's biggest biodiversity boom ever took place after the planet cooled off to conditions much like our current climate. It came to an end with a giant cold snap. In the current day, researchers have found an invasive species that's reversing a species split and bringing three genetically distinct populations back together.

The uglier side of evolution is clear in the problems that drug resistant bacteria are causing. We take a look at an overview of efforts to create new classes of antibiotics and improve to use of existing ones.

Finally, most of us wound up as science fans because we like things that go "boom" on a big scale. If you weren't watching carefully, you might have missed something go boom on the nanometer scale, as the properties of gold naoparticles were used to blast tiny pits in a polymer sheet. These pits could then be read in much the same way a CD is.

I hope you look forward to next week's news as much as the writers do.

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