In the worst of times, don't expect the best in everyone. Scammers are reveling in the financial turmoil by taking advantage of consumers' fears, especially those who are customers of banks most affected by the Wall Street crisis. The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which issued a warning this week, cautioned that people should watch out for e-mails or pop-ups, even if from their own banks, asking for any sensitive personal or financial information. People should double-check their bank and credit card statements for fraudulent activity, the report added.

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It looks like the father of modern physics had more up his sleeve than the theory of relativity. Long after he changed the landscape of modern physics, Albert Einstein and his former student Leo Szilard patented a refrigerator that had no moving parts and used only pressurized gases for cooling. It got overshadowed 20 years later, in the 1950s, when more efficient, if environmentally-damaging, freon-compressors for refrigerators became available.

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The next time you take a trip to the water cooler, just think, what you're about to drink isn't just good for hydration; it makes for a very effective, energy-efficient lens, too. That's what researchers at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have announced after designing and testing an adaptive liquid lens—comprised of a pair of water droplets—that captures 250 pictures per second.

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Sometimes the smallest discovery lends itself to the biggest insight. That certainly was the case for University of Texas at Austin graduate student Christian Rabeling, who found a new ant species in the Amazon that is likely the descendent of one of the first ants to evolve on Earth more than 120 million years ago.

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Food for thought: Your brain is wired to consider various possible meanings for a word before you've even heard the final sound of a word uttered. It's a conclusion scientists at the University of Rochester reached and also proved for the first time using a functional MRI (fMRI)—a tool for brain imaging—to see split-second activity. In the past, scientists postulated that listeners could only follow up to five syllables per second in spoken language by drawing from a small subset of words already known by the listener.

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It's a well-accepted notion that if you want to master multiple languages, you should learn them at a young age. But new research reveals that learning young can have some serious downsides. According to a study released this week in the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood, children who are bilingual before age five have a higher chance of developing a stutter than those who learned only one language.

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What's in a name? A lot more than etymology. When it comes to junk mail, it turns out some names fare better than others in e-mail addresses depending on what letter they start with, according to a study conducted at the University of Cambridge. In an attempt to explain why certain people get more spam, computer security researcher Dr. Richard Clayton reviewed more than 550 million e-mails sent to customers through one of the U.K's. biggest internet service providers between February and March this year.

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Think smoking is bad for you? Try just breathing. Louisiana scientists have discovered a group of previously undetected air pollutants that when inhaled exposes the average person to 300 times more free radicals than that of one cigarette in a day.

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Ever wished you could have Harry Potter's invisibility cloak? Science, not magic, could make that a reality. Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley have created materials that have the potential to bend light and even redirect it around themselves, cloaking any object behind them. They are metamaterials, materials that gain unusual properties via their structures. While all materials found in nature have a positive refractive index, these man-made metamaterials have a negative one.

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All elephants are known to have good memories, but it's the older ones that are wisest during times of trouble. According to researchers at the Wildlife Conservation Society and Zoological Society of London, older female elephants with knowledge of distant resources of food and water could help herds survive during crises like droughts.

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