News Articles

 By simply manipulating chemical gradients in a beaker of fluid, researchers have been able to create delicate flower structures -  not at the scale of inches, but microns.
These minuscule sculptures don't resemble the cubic or jagged forms normally associated with crystals, though that's what they are. Rather, fields of carnations and marigolds seem to bloom from the surface of a submerged glass slide, assembling themselves a molecule at a time.

Do you see music the same way as your neighbor? Apparently so.  U.C. Berkeley psychologists say people in both the United States and Mexico linked the same pieces of classical orchestral music with the same colors, suggesting that humans share a common emotional palette – when it comes to music and color – that appears to be intuitive and can cross cultural barriers. They suggest that
our brains are wired to make music-color connections depending on how the melodies make us feel 

Uranus and Neptune have a lot in common, climate-wise, even though Uranus is tipped on its side with the pole facing the sun during winter.  They are both home to extreme winds blowing at speeds of over 1000 km/hour, they have hurricane-like storms as big as our whole planet and immense weather systems can last for years. 
But what about their origins? Do the atmospheric patterns arise from deep down in the planet, or are they confined to shallower processes nearer the surface?  Understanding the atmospheric circulation is not simple for a planet without a solid surface, where Earth-style boundaries between solid, liquid and gas layers do not exist.

Terror networks are comparable in their structure to hierarchical organization in companies and certain online social networks, say the authors of a paper outlining how
a mathematical model to disrupt flow of information in a complex real-world network, like a terrorist organization, can work, using minimal resources. 
In those hierarchical social networks, information flows in one direction from a source, which produces the information or data, downwards to sinks, which consume it. 

A group contends that the journal impact factor (JIF), which ranks scholarly journals by the average number of citations their articles attract in a set period, has increasingly become an obsession in science. Impact factor of articles is used in evaluating research for funding, hiring, promotion, or institutional effectiveness. 

Hofstadter's Butterfly, a complex pattern of the energy states of electrons that resembles a butterfly, has appeared in physics textbooks as a theoretical concept of quantum mechanics for nearly 40 years but had never been directly observed - until now. 

The Obama Administration released an updated draft proposal that would establish common sense safety standards for hydraulic fracturing on public and Indian lands. Following the release of an initial draft proposal in 2012, the Department of the Interior received over 177,000 public comments that helped shape today’s updated draft proposal. The new proposal maintainssafety standards, improves integration with existing state and tribal standards and increases flexibility for oil and gas developers. The updated draft proposal will be subject to a new 30-day public comment period.

Depending on the species, males have different strategies to try and insure that they reproduce, rather than just being a step-parent.
They may try to ensure paternity by increased surveillance and fighting off the competition, they may have more frequent sex with their long-term partners, they may physically punish unfaithful females or refuse to parent potentially unrelated offspring.

What was the diet and movements of the first New Zealanders like?
Isotopes from their bones and teeth can tell us. Researchers say they have been
able to identify what is likely to be the first group of people to colonize Marlborough's Wairau Bar, possibly from Polynesia around 700 years ago. They also present evidence suggesting that individuals from two other groups buried at the site had likely lived in different regions of New Zealand before being buried at Wairau Bar. 
The researchers undertook isotopic analyses of samples recovered from the koiwi tangata (human remains) of the Rangitane iwi tupuna (ancestors) prior to their reburial at Wairau Bar in 2009. 

The Karoo Array Telescope (KAT-7) in South Africa, the pathfinder radio telescope for the $3 billion global Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project, has released its first results.

 4C+29.30, a galaxy located some 850 million light years from Earth, has a new composite image which shows how the intense gravity of a supermassive black hole can be tapped to generate immense power.
 This multi-wavelength view reveals that the radio emission of 4C+29.30 comes from two jets of particles that are speeding at millions of miles per hour away from a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. The estimated mass of the black hole is about 100 million times the mass of our Sun. The ends of the jets show larger areas of radio emission located outside the galaxy. 

An analysis of 4,000 abstracts of peer-reviewed articles on the topic of global warming and climate change has revealed an overwhelming consensus among climate scientists that recent warming is human-caused.