It happens in school, at work, physically, verbally, even by email and text — now researchers at The University of Nottingham say there’s no escape in the virtual world.

Researchers are examining the worrying appearance of bullying in the virtual world. Citizens (avatars) of Second Life say targets are likely to be individuals who are new to the virtual world.

Using ESO's VLTI on Cerro Paranal and the VLBA facility operated by NRAO, an international team of astronomers has made what is arguably the most detailed study of the environment of a pulsating red giant star. They performed, for the first time, a series of coordinated observations of three separate layers within the star's tenuous outer envelope: the molecular shell, the dust shell, and the maser shell, leading to significant progress in our understanding of the mechanism of how, before dying, evolved stars lose mass and return it to the interstellar medium.

An international team of astronomers with the Trans-atlantic Exoplanet Survey today announce the discovery of their third planet, TrES-3. The new planet was identified by astronomers looking for transiting planets - that is, planets that pass in front of their home star - using a network of small automated telescopes in Arizona, California, and the Canary Islands. TrES-3 was discovered in the constellation Hercules about 10 degrees west of Vega, the brightest star in the summer skies.

The large molecular gas cloud in the constellation of Taurus is the nearest star formation region and a star formation test environment for expert theorists and observers alike. The XMM-Newton project has provided by far the most sensitive and comprehensive X-ray survey of this region, for the first time systematically detecting almost all young stars embedded in the cloud as X-ray sources, including many objects with the lowest mass, the so-called brown dwarfs, and stars still in the process of growing, the so-called protostars.

People are not always sure there is a science to relatonships until I spend a minute explaining it to them. Everything in the universe is about inductance. Inductance has lots of gobbledy-gook definitions that require you to know what a lot of other words mean, so physics definitions don't always help, but inertia is part of the lexicon and everyone knows what that is.

Rats paralyzed due to loss of blood flow to the spine returned to near normal ambulatory function six weeks after receiving grafts of human spinal stem cells (hSSCs), researchers from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine report.

“We demonstrated that when damage has occurred due to a loss of blood flow to the spine’s neural cells, by grafting human neural stem cells directly into the spinal cord we can achieve a progressive recovery of motor function,” said Martin Marsala, M.D., UC San Diego professor of anesthesiology.

It is easy to observe that many networks naturally divide into communities or modules, where links within modules are stronger and denser than those across modules – like the way people from the same age group tend to interact more with each other than with people from different age groups. It is widely believed that networks within cells are modular in much the same way. Drs Zhi Wang and Jianzhi Zhang, from the University of Michigan, now investigate these modular properties and conclude that they may be only a random byproduct of evolution, and not functional at all.

NASA and Columbia University Earth Institute research finds that human-made greenhouse gases have brought the Earth’s climate close to critical tipping points, with potentially dangerous consequences for the planet.

From a combination of climate models, satellite data, and paleoclimate records the scientists conclude that the West Antarctic ice sheet, Arctic ice cover, and regions providing fresh water sources and species habitat are under threat from continued global warming.

Three new drugs are predicted to help transform the long-term prognosis for people with the AIDS virus, says an editorial in BMJ, which points towards highly promising results from trials of three new drugs.

HIV patients in “deep salvage” – meaning those people who have developed multidrug resistant HIV that does not respond to drug combination therapy – could benefit the most.

Researchers exploring the notion that certain nutrients might protect against pancreatic cancer found that lean individuals who got most of these nutrients from food were protected against developing cancer. The study also suggests this protective effect does not hold true if the nutrients come from vitamin supplements.

Investigators combined data from four large studies and found that people who were at or below normal body weight decreased their risk for developing pancreatic cancer if they took in high levels of vitamin B6, vitamin B12, and folate from food. The study determined that their risk was 81 percent, 73 percent, and 59 percent lower, vitamin B6, vitamin B12, and folate respectively, compared with participants who did not eat as much of these nutrients or who weighed more.