A catastrophic megaflood separated Britain from France hundreds of thousands of years ago, changing the course of British history, according to research led by Sanjeev Gupta and Jenny Collier from Imperial College London, has revealed spectacular images of a huge valley tens of kilometres wide and up to 50 metres deep carved into chalk bedrock on the floor of the English Channel.

Using high-resolution sonar waves the team captured images of a perfectly preserved submerged world in the channel basin. The maps highlight deep scour marks and landforms which were created by torrents of water rushing over the exposed channel basin.

To the north of the channel basin was a lake which formed in the area now known as the southern North Sea.

The orbiting X-ray telescopes XXM-Newton and Chandra have caught a pair of galaxy clusters merging into a giant cluster. The discovery adds to existing evidence that galaxy clusters can collide faster than previously thought.

When individual galaxies collide and spiral into one another, they discard trails of hot gas that stretch across space, providing signposts to the mayhem. Recognising the signs of collisions between whole clusters of galaxies, however, is not as easy.

When individual galaxies collide and spiral into one another, they discard trails of hot gas that stretch across space, providing signposts to the mayhem.

Students' performance on annual math and science assessments improved in almost every age group when their schools were involved in a program that partners K-12 teachers with their colleagues in higher education.

While an earlier study tracked schools that began work in the first year of the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Math and Science Partnership program (MSP), the most recent study followed more than 300 schools participating in partnerships that began to be funded during the program's second year.

Participating school districts found that a significantly higher proportion of students scored at the "proficient" level or higher on state math and science assessments in the 2004-2005 school year than they had in 2003-2004.

This post provides an update of our CombiUgi project. From a larger perspective I think that this can be useful to people interested in how collaborative Open Science actually works. For those who have not been following the progress of the CombiUgi project on our mailing list, here is a brief update. The basic idea is to generate libraries of compounds that can be made quickly in the lab. The compounds in these virtual libraries are then prioritized according to potential usefulness (anti-malaria, anti-tumor, etc.).

The link between alcohol and aggression is well known. What’s not so clear is just why drunks get belligerent. What is it about the brain-on-alcohol that makes fighting seem like a good idea" And do all intoxicated people get more aggressive" Or does it depend on the circumstances"

University of Kentucky psychologist Peter Giancola and his student Michelle Corman decided to explore these questions in the laboratory. One theory about alcohol and aggression is that drinking impairs the part of the brain involved in allocating our limited mental resources—specifically attention and working memory.

Taking part in group psychotherapy can help men who have erectile dysfunction to overcome their problem, and adding sildenafil to group therapy was more effective that sildenafil alone. In addition, group psychotherapy was more effective than taking sildenafil on its own, a Cochrane Systematic Review has found.

Normal sexual function relies on the coordination of psychological, endocrine, vascular and neurological factor. Recent research has increased attention on the role of psychological issues. In particular, depression, low self-esteem, anxiety and other psychosocial stresses can play a large role in erectile dysfunction.

Engineers at the University of Pennsylvania have taken a step toward simplifying the creation of nanostructures by identifying the first inorganic material to phase separate with near-perfect order at the nanometer scale.

The finding provides an atomically tuneable nanocomposite “workbench” that is cheap and easy to produce and provides a super-lattice foundation potentially suitable for building nanostructures.

Alerted by an unusual diffraction effect of a common ceramic material, researchers used imaging to identify a two-phase structural pattern ideal as the first step towards nanodevice construction.

A thumb’s up for “I’m good.” The rubbing of a pointed forefinger at another for “shame on you.” The infamous and ubiquitous middle finger salute for—well, you know. Such gestures that convey meaning without speech are used and recognized by nearly everyone in our society, but to someone from a foreign country, they may be incomprehensible.

The opposite is true as well. Plop an American in a foreign land and he or she may be clueless to the common gestures of that particular culture. This raises a provocative question—does culture influence the brain"

A new method which will allow more effective voice discrimination has been developed by researchers at the University of Hertfordshire.

Dr Aladdin Ariyaeeinia at the University’s School of Electronic Communication & Electrical Engineering and his team have been conducting research into voice biometrics (speaker recognition) for over 10 years. The process has various potential applications such as verifying individuals’ identities when they try to access cash machines or try to bank or shop online.

The team’s most recent development is a new approach to speaker change detection, a process which captures when speakers change in a given conversational audio stream which could have very useful applications in criminal investigations and in managing audio-visual recordings.

A new study of bottomland hardwood forests in the southeastern United States suggests that the increased growth of vines may change the landscape of these forests.

Researchers charting the growth of vines in two forests in South Carolina found up to a 10-fold increase in the number of vines in just two decades. Vines commonly found in both forests include grapevines, trumpet vine, poison ivy and Virginia creeper.