Today, people have a general knowledge on the effects of taking in recreational drugs. Well, in the days when society had no clue, experiments were carried out by curious scientists. We encountered the list of the top five recreational drugs experiment. Check out the list in the full article.

Anger might not be all that bad. According to psychologists from Boston College and Standford University, anger is an emotion preferred to be used by people whenever they would undertake any activity that requires confrontation. More details can be found in the full article.

If you're male and find it a wee bit difficult to put down the controller when you're playing a video game, then the findings of a Stanford study might be able provide you with a pretty interesting reason behind it.

In a study done by Allan Reiss and his colleagues, they were able to find out that video games have a greater effect on the reward region of the brain of men than in women. Details of their study in the full article.

Albert Einstein's principle of equivalence states that objects of different mass still fall at the same speed when influenced by gravity. After being accepted for years, the physics community are now planning to subject this very principle to test.

The efforts are being led by Standford University and actual testing will begin in a couple of months. How exactly are they going to do it? Know the full details after the jump!

Scientists from Stanford University and Jennerex Biotherapeutics have further modified the cancer killing vaccinia virus (JX-963) to make it even more potent. The researchers have found a way to allow this strain to stimulate its host to create cancer-fighting white blood cells.

Ever since it was first developed, virus therapies have had limited success in eliminating all the cancer cells in the body. This new method calls upon the body's own defenses to help defend itself against cancer. The modifications on the virus has it producing a substance called granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF), a protein that stimulates the production of white blood cells.

Dr. Stephen Thorne, Co-author of the study and professor of surgical oncology at the University of Pittsburgh, spoke about their experiments saying that "The results are very encouraging. I would envisage clinical trials starting next year." His optimism is shared by other scientists such as Dr. Antonio Chiocca, a professor from Ohio State University, who said that "This is a very powerful and potent approach. You can think of each of these viruses as a new drug."

Before people get excited about the potential of this new virus, we have to remember that there is a risk in using these viruses since they could mutate into a deadlier form. Hopefully, the scientists find a way to get around that problem and finally develop a cure for cancer.

Researchers from Stanford University have developed a blood test that appears to identify patients who have or are prone to contracting Alzheimer's disease. If the initial findings prove correct, then doctors will have a new tool in diagnosing this neurodegenerative disease which kills 66,000 Americans each year.

The scientists have found that those with Alzheimer's consistently have a set of 18 distinct chemical signals in their blood. Stanford neurology Professor Tony Wyss-Coray, the team leader of the project, said that these are signaling proteins that cells use to communicate with each other and that they decided to look for the more distinctive proteins in Alzheimer's patients.

In one of their experiments, the scientists found that the new method was able to correctly identify Alzheimer stricken individuals 90% of the time. The test was also able to classify individuals without Alzheimer's disease but had other mild cognitive diseases with 87% accuracy.

While the results look promising, Wyss-Coray said that it will take at least two more years and further studies before this new method can be adopted by clinics across the United States. If this is further developed, then this will be another new tool in the fight against Alzheimer's disease.

Scientists at the company LS9 are nearing completion on a project they call "renewable petroleum," which may turn out to be the answer to the Earth's depleting oil supply and our dependence on the oil fields of the Middle East.

LS9 was founded by George Church, a geneticist from Harvard Medical School and Chris Somerville, a plant biologist from Stanford University. Apparently if you put a geneticist and a plant biologist together you get oil-making bacteria. LS9 has developed a way for bacteria, plants and animals to make petroleum.

How does this work? Organisms make fatty acids to store energy. By modifying certain genetic pathways, scientists can take the acid away from the fatty and what you get is fatty oil. More specifically, a hydrocarbon that can be made into fuel.

One of the advantages of LS9's new process is that their product is purely oil, not ethanol, which studies show do not contain as much energy as gas and also may be more dangerous to the public at large.

LS9 claims to be able to make hundreds of different hydrocarbons using bacteria. An advantage to this is that harvesting the oil doesn't involve the contaminating sulfur they get from underground crude oil. LS9 hopes to have the oil out within three to five years.

There's a lot of legitimate personality tests to be found if one trawls the interwebs, all of them shoehorning the examinee into a personality type one may or may not agree with. Nothing's bad about knowing what sort of person you actually are, and what your capabilities are that tie in to that type of personality you're assigned to.

But there could be proof that such a way of thinking, that a person could permanently be set in that personality is not only wrong, but detrimental to his growth and self-actualization.

This theory comes from Psychologist Carol Dweck, of Stanford University. She cites a very plausible (and probably very real) situation: of people confining themselves to the personality type they've been assigned to, boxing themselves in and ignoring their hidden potential.

It's not just all supposition, either, with Carol seeing the exact same thing in action while observing students in Columbia University. She found that those students who had fixed views on intelligence merely concentrated on proving how smart they were - and as a result, they were less motivated to actually learn something new and take on challenges they haven't experienced before.

And to make matters worse, its effects are not confined to schoolwork, as Carol expounds:

It has a big impact on their motivation and achievement. It plays a role in business and in social relationships, whether people can solve conflicts, and also whether they can bounce back from failures and rejections.

But there's an easy way to solve this counter-productive way of thinking: teach the kids (and even the adults) that personalities can in fact change, and that no individual can be shoe-horned into a definite personality archetype that maps out everything from his strengths to his weaknesses. Do that, and their beliefs change, unlocking their hidden potential buried underneath years of false conditioning. Carol herself puts the message across best:

When you change the belief, a lot of important things happen: students' motivation turns around; their grades and test scores go up; managers become better mentors, more successful negotiators.

With today's trends of astral signs, personality quizzes, and even more gimmicks giving people the wrong ideas about themselves, it's good to know some people have picked up on its harmful effects, and are busy trying to unlock the lost potential in today's youth (as well as today's adults).

CNET news reports that Purdue University professor Jerry Woodall has discovered a way to create hydrogen out of a reaction of water and an alloy of aluminum and gallium.

Despite current skepticism about using hydrogen as a fuel source, mainly due to the fact that it is quite difficult to do and costly to obtain, others have noted that perhaps research like this along with other hydrogen developments could help dispel the prevailing criticism against using hydrogen for fuel.

Such is the criticism against looking into hydrogen as a source of energy that during the Clean Energy Venture Summit, James Woolsey, former director of the CIA and an alternate energy advocate, said that for now, looking into hydrogen is a distraction, and he notes that he favors other solutions like plug-in hybrids or clean diesel. Woolsey received a standing ovation.

Woodall, however, estimates that the technique he's developed can produce fuel that can compete with gas at 3 dollars a gallon. The actual hydrogen fuel will be more expensive than gasoline, but in turn is more efficient, and will dissipate the costs in the long run.

Here's how the good professor made his discovery:

I was cleaning a crucible containing liquid alloys of gallium and aluminum. When I added water to this alloy--talk about a discovery--there was a violent poof. I went to my office and worked out the reaction in a couple of hours to figure out what had happened. When aluminum atoms in the liquid alloy come into contact with water, they react, splitting the water and producing hydrogen and aluminum oxide.

Other research into extracting hydrogen from water in a cost-efficient manner include Ecotality's procedure that involves magnesium oxide pellets, Signa Chemistry's process that uses water, sodium, and silicon, and Stanford University's James Swartz's biological means of using a microorganism to split up water molecule

Maybe it comes with experience and age, we're not certain. But one recent study suggested that certain brain regions in older adults aren't that active when responding to a potential financial loss. The key word here is potential - nothing has been lost or even earned yet.

The said study was conducted by Stanford University psychologist Gregory Samanez Larkin. The sample population consisted of 12 19- to 27-year-old people and another 12 65- to 81-year-old folks. These participants were given several tasks that required them to respond to a cue whenever they are about to earn or lose money.

Furthermore, both groups showed the same brain activity when they are about to gain financially. The group of older people, quite interestingly, didn't show any increased brain functions when faced with the prospect of losing money. Larkin reported,

When you tell them you might lose some money, the younger adults reported being really stressed out. They were pretty anxious about the potential to lose. This is just anticipation, nothing has happened yet. When [the older people] do actually lose money they showed indistinguishable activation.

Larkin added that the result can be interpreted in two ways. First, it could reflect well-being and maturity among older people because they are not stressed out by something that hasn't happened yet. On the other hand, Larkin commented that this could also explain why older people are generally vulnerable to scams,

Older adults are fine dealing with gains but something is screwed up with how they deal with losses, because they’re not really anticipating them like the young people are. One possible example is older adults are especially vulnerable to being scammed and this lack of brain activation could be to blame.