The Universe began about 13.8 billion years ago and evolved from an extremely hot, dense and uniform state to the rich and complex cosmos of galaxies, stars and planets we see today. The key source of information about that history is the Cosmic Microwave Background - CMB - the legacy of light emitted only 380 000 years after the Big Bang.

Astronomers have been searching searching for a particular signature of cosmic ‘inflation’ – a very brief accelerated expansion that, according to current theory, the Universe experienced when it was only the tiniest fraction of a second old. This signature would be seeded by gravitational waves, tiny perturbations in the fabric of space-time, that astronomers believe would have been generated during the inflationary phase. 

Much of the public think malpractice insurance is a big cost of health care and so they rightly think that if there were reasonable checks on lawsuit judgments health care would be affordable without government intervention.

There is no rest for a baby's brain - not even in sleep. While infants sleep they are reprocessing what they have learned. Working with researchers from the University of Tübingen, scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig have discovered that babies of the age from 9 to 16 months remember the names of objects better if they had a short nap. And only after sleeping can they transfer learned names to similar new objects. The infant brain thus forms general categories during sleep, converting experience into knowledge.

Finding out whether you have been infected with dengue may soon be as easy as spitting into a rapid test kit. The Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (IBN) of A*STAR has developed a paper-based disposable device that will allow dengue-specific antibodies to be detected easily from saliva within 20 minutes. This device is currently undergoing further development for commercialization.

89 percent of young people in one region of Spain own their first mobile phone before they reach the age of 13 and a recent study has analyzed the use of information and communication technologies by using a sample of 5,538 students from the Vallès Occidental region of Catalonia.

The study, based on surveys taken in the 2010/2011 academic year, finds links between school failure and an elevated use of computers at home. It also correlates an intensive use of video devices with the consumption of toxic substances. 

NWA 7034 - Black Beauty - is a meteorite found a few years ago in the Moroccan desert. Now it has been shown to be a 4.4 billion-year-old chunk of the Martian crust, and according to a new analysis, rocks just like it may cover vast swaths of Mars.

In a new paper, scientists report that spectroscopic measurements of the meteorite are a spot-on match with orbital measurements of the Martian dark plains, areas where the planet's coating of red dust is thin and the rocks beneath are exposed. The findings suggest that the meteorite, nicknamed Black Beauty, is representative of the "bulk background" of rocks on the Martian surface, says Kevin Cannon, a Brown University graduate student and lead author of the new paper.