If you have yet to see TLC's documentary show Hoarding: Buried Alive, and you don't know what hoarding is - it's a condition in which people compulsively acquire and keep things. The brief clip below gives you a sense of how this psychological disorder manifests and how crippling it can be.

Last night as I watched the show for the first time, I was struck by how familiar some of the homes were. That's when I realized that my own parents, whom I had always euphemistically described as "pack rats," were hoarders.The next thing that struck me as I looked around my own home, despite its relative orderliness, was that perhaps they had passed this trait on to me.Then I thought about the reasons I enjoy being a journalist and a blogger: immersing myself in the day's news, spending idle moments cataloging potential story ideas, the security of knowing that I always have something interesting to read in my gargantuan Instapaper queue...It turns out this is a real condition. [Read the full article]

New legislation might slow green technology investment, but other laws could help pick up the slack.A proposition on the November ballot in California would suspend the state's major greenhouse-gas emissions law. If it passes, it could delay or eliminate many proposed renewable-energy projects in California. However, its impact is difficult to predict because other legislation will help spur investment in many projects and green-tech startups.Proposition 23 would suspend a 2006 law aimed at reducing California's greenhouse-gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. The law, known as AB 32, authorizes a wide range of rules and regulations designed to meet this goal. The main part of the law is a cap-and-trade system under which affected businesses would have to either reduce their own emissions or buy emissions allowances from other companies that have reduced their emissions. [Read the full article]

Scanning 1,200 brains could help researchers chart the organ's fine structure and better understand neurological disorders.A massive new project to scan the brains of 1,200 volunteers could finally give scientists a picture of the neural architecture of the human brain and help them understand the causes of certain neurological and psychological diseases.The National Institutes of Health announced $40 million in funding this month for the five-year effort, dubbed the Human Connectome Project. Scientists will use new imaging technologies, some still under development, to create both structural and functional maps of the human brain.The project is novel in its size; most brain-imaging studies have looked at tens to hundreds of brains. Scanning so many people will shed light on the normal variability within the brain structure of healthy adults, which will in turn provide a basis for examining how neural "wiring" differs in such disorders as autism and schizophrenia. [Read the full article]

The Physics arXiv Blog produces daily coverage of the best new ideas from an online forum called the Physics arXiv on which scientists post early versions of their latest ideas. Contact me atKentuckyFC @ arxivblog.comLook out into space and the signs are plain to see. The universe began in a Big Bang event some 13 billion years ago and has been expanding ever since. And the best evidence from the distance reaches of the cosmos is that this expansion is accelerating.That has an important but unavoidable consequence: it means the universe will expand forever. And a universe that expands forever is infinite and eternal.Today, a group of physicists rebel against this idea. They say an infinitely expanding universe cannot be so because the laws of physics do not work in an infinite cosmos. For these laws to make any sense, the universe must end, say Raphael Bousso at the University of California, Berkeley and few pals. [Read the full article]