When love sucks: now you've got another reason to blame your mother

thezartorialist.com on Flickr

​Can't get along with your spouse? Jessica Salvatore, a University of Minnesota doctoral student, has one explanation: it's his mother's fault.

Several years back, study participants in their 20s were asked to come into the research lab to talk about an issue they didn't agree on. Then, after a couple of minutes to cool down, they had to spend a few minutes talking about something that wasn't conflict-ridden. And looking back at that second conversation, Salvatore noticed some interesting trends.

No matter how heated their argument, some couples were able to move on smoothly. Others simply got stuck.

More »

​The screw-ups at the Tri-County Regional Forensic Laboratory who inflated the blood-alcohol content in urine samples over the last year got nearly a dozen innocent people charged with drunk driving.

The cause of the error wasn't some malfunction in sophisticated equipment or contaminated lab apparatus, either. According to a review by the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, the lab wasn't performing the basic math calculations necessary to get the correct results. Since the lab never multiplied it's alcohol concentrations by 0.67, every result it reported since January was a third higher than the actual concentration.

Ajay Talam

If you did time for a DWI in Anoka, Sherburne, or Wright Counties this year, there's a chance that you were wrongly convicted by bad lab-work.

KSTP has gotten its hands on a letter from the Tri-County Regional Forensic laboratory that says that because of "miscalculations" in their urine testing, blood-alcohol levels were reported as being a third higher than they were in reality.

More »

Photo via NASA

The rumors we reported may be true: Dark matter may have been found for at the Soudan Underground Lab particle physics laboratory's Cryogenic Dark Matter Search project. The facility, run by the University of Minnesota, is about 225 miles north of Minneapolis, between Virginia and Ely.

It's big deal because scientists believe dark matter, believed to make up 90 percent of the universe, is a missing link in the effort to understand the big bang theory behind the creation of the universe. It's been detected in space. But it's never been detected on Earth.

More »

Last week we learned that scientists were all abuzz about the possibility that the first Earth-bound dark matter may have been discovered deep inside a mine in Soudan, and that proof of the discovery was going to be published in an upcoming edition of the science journal Nature.

Whether or not such dark matter exists at the University of Minnesota's Soudan facility, up north between Ely and Virginia, a Nature editor has thrown cold water on the notion that the highly-regarded magazine is going to carry a paper about it. Here's what the magazine's editor for physical sciences, Leslie Sage, said in an e-mail to the science blog REASONANNCES, which covers the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search project.

More »

Dark matter, a mysterious and perhaps-undetected-until-now substance said by scientists to make up 90 percent of the universe, may have been found for the first time on Earth, at the bottom of a mine in Soudan.

The Earth-bound discovery -- if it turns out to be a discovery -- took place at the Soudan Underground Lab particle physics laboratory's Cryogenic Dark Matter Search project. The facility, run by the University of Minnesota, is about 225 miles north of Minneapolis, between Virginia and Ely.

If the rumors prove true, New Scientist magazine says the discovery could help scientists better understand the formation and behavior of the universe, and the big bang theory.

NASA says it discovered proof of dark matter in space in 2006.

More »

​Science nerds, arm chair rock stars, and gamers, meet Roxanne.

Pete Nikrin, a manufacturing engineer, teamed up with an instructor at his alma mater, Minnesota West Technical College, to create a Guitar Hero-playing robot for some awesome reason. The (paranoid) android can detect transitions between light and dark pixels in whatever it is she's focused on, thanks to a sensor implanted in her left eye (the patch-like abrasion over said eye is not, as we first surmised, a nod to the late Lisa Lopes).

More »

​About a month back, we wrote about an ostensibly education exhibit featuring preserved corpses making its unlikely debut in the Mall of America. "Bodies... The Exhibition" had elicited outcry for a number reason, the of which being the murky origins of the cadavers-- there's evidence that some were political prisoners from China who died behind bars.

More »

PnP!/ Flickr

Downtown St. Paul in 2070

The evocatively named Union of Concerned Scientists has released a new study warning what unchecked climate change will mean for specific states, including Minnesota, and the scenario isn't pretty--unless you're really into tanning or a lemonade entrepreneur. According to the Ph.Ds with furrowed brows, if heat-trapping emissions continue to rise at their current rate, Minnesota would see:

More »

When it comes to the evolution vs. creationism "debate," what side you come down on depends largely on your high school biology teacher's grip-on-reality (or lack thereof), according to a recent University of Minnesota study.

Published in this month's issue of BioScience (a journal put out by the American Institute of Biological Sciences), the report found that students who learned the biological ropes from admitted creationists are more likely to embrace centuries-old fairy tales themselves, even after entering adulthood.

More »