News Articles

Do we process language we hear without regard to anything about the speaker?
Perhaps or perhaps not. A small psychological experiment using University of Kansas undergraduates who were paid to participate and spoke Spanish found that the sex of a speaker affected how quickly listeners identified words grammatically - evidence that even higher-level processes are affected by the speaker. 14 of the participants were female and 6 were male.

When mother mice compete socially for mates in a promiscuous environment, their sons play hard - they also die young.
More urinary pheromones attract more females but smelling sexier shortens their lives.

An unusually large find, more 600 stamp seals and cylinder seals, have been found so far in an ancient sanctuary
of the storm and weather god Jupiter Dolichenus
in Turkey.
The stamp seals and cylinder seals as well as scarabs, made of glass, stone and quartz ceramics, were mostly crafted in a high-quality manner. Following the restoration work, the finds were handed over to the relevant museum in Gaziantep in Turkey. 

The FDA is investigating a multi-state outbreak of E. coli O157 illnesses possibly linked to pre-packaged salad products.  26 cases of illness were reported in 3 states, Arizona, California, and Washington.  On November 10, 2013, the the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) announced that Glass Onion Catering, a Richmond, Calif. establishment, is recalling approximately 181,620 pounds of ready-to-eat salads and sandwich wrap products with fully-cooked chicken and ham because some of these products have been linked to the illnesses through epidemiological and traceback investigation.

The famous Von Neumann-Day math problem, first described by mathematician John von Neumann in 1929, has gotten a geometric solution, according to Cornell University researchers. Graduate student Yash Lodha, working with Justin Moore, professor of mathematics, has described a geometric solution for the von Neumann-Day problem, first described by mathematician John von Neumann in 1929.

Posting the calorie content of menu items at major fast-food chains in Philadelphia, per federal law, hasn't change purchasing habits or decreased the number of calories that those customers consume, researchers reported Friday at the Obesity Society's annual scientific meeting, held in Atlanta. 
The results echo those conducted by the same researchers among low-income neighborhoods in New York City before and after calorie-labels were mandated there in July 2008, lending more evidence to the arguments that micro-managing food choice in the name of awareness doesn't work for the intended group.

Laboratory animals fed a modified version of a common genetically modified probiotic were completely cured of intestinal worms that belong to a family of parasites that currently infect 1.5 billion people, or almost one quarter of the world's population, according to new research presented today at the annual meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (ASTMH).

New research from the University of Washington Information School and Harvard University, followed 20 years of student creative writing and visual artworks and finds that the dynamics of creativity are changing.
They wanted to find out if creativity was in decline and found instead that some aspects of creativity — such as visual arts — have been rising over the years, while other aspects, such as creative writing, could be declining. 

Children's congenital heart defects may be associated with their mothers' exposure to specific mixtures of environmental toxins during pregnancy, according to research presented at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions 2013.
Congenital heart defects occur when the heart or blood vessels near the heart don't develop normally before birth. Defects may be caused by chromosomal abnormalities, but the cause is unknown in most cases.

Chicago – Jose Augusto Barreto-Filho, M.D., Ph.D., of the Federal University of Sergipe and the Clinica e Hospital Sao Lucas, Sergipe, Brazil, and colleagues assessed procedure rates and outcomes of surgical aortic valve replacement (AVR) among 82,755,924 Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries between 1999 and 2011.

Kids love penguins. They sing and dance in cartoons, they waddle like Charlie Chaplin on land - but underwater, they are all business, accelerating from 0 to 15 miles per hour in less than a second. 

A normally fragile quantum state has been shown to survive at room temperature for a world record 39 minutes, overcoming a key barrier towards building ultrafast quantum computers.
In conventional computers data is stored as a string of 1s and 0s. In the experiment quantum bits of information, 'qubits', were put into a 'superposition' state in which they can be both 1s and 0 at the same time – enabling them to perform multiple calculations simultaneously.