News Articles

Detecting alien worlds is a significant challenge since they are small, faint, and close to their stars. The two most prolific techniques for finding exoplanets are radial velocity (looking for wobbling stars) and transits (looking for dimming stars). 
A team at Tel Aviv University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) has just discovered an exoplanet and the planet they found, Kepler-76b, was identified by the BEER algorithm; an acronym for relativistic BEaming, Ellipsoidal, and Reflection/emission modulations. BEER was developed by Professor Tsevi Mazeh and his student, Simchon Faigler, at Tel Aviv University in Israel and is a new method that relies on Einstein's special theory of relativity.

We all know that the Earth is in constant motion, rotating beneath our feet, but new research in Nature Geoscience
reveals that the center of the Earth is out of sync with the rest of the planet and is frequently speeding up and slowing down.Associate Professor Hrvoje Tkalcic from the ANU College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences and his team used earthquake doublets to measure the rotation speed of Earth’s inner core over the last 50 years and discovered that not only did the inner core rotate at a different rate to the mantle – the layer between the core and the crust that makes up most of the planet’s interior – but its rotation speed was variable.

Rather than Draconian measures to cut emissions, which will impact people in various regions and economic spheres unfairly, a better solution may be to simply keep places cooler on hot days, which will reduce fuel needed for air conditioning.And outer space can help, Stanford researchers say. They designed an entirely new form of cooling structure that cools even when the sun is shining - by reflecting sunlight back into the chilly vacuum of space. 

The movement of nitrate through groundwater to streams can take decades to occur and that long lag time means that changes in the use of nitrogen-based fertilizer (the typical source of nitrate) may take decades to be fully observed in streams, according to a recent study.Water quality experts have been noting in recent years that nitrate trends in streams and rivers do not match their expectations based on reduced regional use of nitrogen-based fertilizer.  The long travel times of groundwater discharge, like those documented in this study, have previously been suggested as the likely factor responsible for these observations.

The large majority of non-coding DNA, which is abundant in many living things, may not actually be needed for complex life in at least one carnivorous plant, Utricularia gibba, according to a paper in Nature.
U. gibba,  the carnivorous bladderwort plant, genome is the smallest ever to be sequenced from a complex, multicellular plant. The researchers who sequenced it say that 97 percent of the genome consists of genes — bits of DNA that code for proteins — and small pieces of DNA that control those genes.

An anti-cocaine vaccine has been successfully tested in primates, bringing it a step closer to human clinical trials.

Do you support unions, a minimum wage, dislike business and hate child labor and then tell all of your friends on your iPhone?
People rationalize moral standards when it comes to their own lives, say economists writing in Science. It's easy to lament child labor and exploitation of the work force but if you are not willing to pay $2,000 for a phone, you are part of the problem and Tweeting about social issues on that phone helps precisely no one but corporate shareholders.

'Pestilence', widespread outbreaks of deadly contagious disease, are known throughout history. In popular translations of the Christian Bible, Pestilence is one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Today we call them pandemics but they are nothing like plagues of old, when up to 33% of a population was eradicated, like during the Black Death of the 14th century.

Using advanced underwater imaging techniques, one of the most detailed analysis ever of the archaeological remains of the lost medieval town of Dunwich - 'Britain's Atlantis' - have been revealed.

The Carmona necropolis in Spain is a collection of funeral structures built between 200 B.C. and 200 A.D. One of them is known as the Elephant's Tomb because a statue in the shape of an elephant was found in the interior of the structure.

Cirrus clouds, the thin wisps of vapor that coalesce in the upper layers of the troposphere and trail across the sky, often more than 10 miles above the Earth's surface, influence our global climate, cooling the planet by reflecting incoming solar radiation and warming it by trapping outgoing heat.
Understanding the mechanisms by which these clouds form would help scientists make accurate predictions about future climate patterns.

Water found on the moon and Earth came from small meteorites called carbonaceous chondrites in the first 100 million years or so after the solar system formed, according to researchers who found evidence in samples of moon dust returned by lunar crews of Apollo 15 and 17.
Comets did not deliver the molecules, they conclude in their Science Express article.
The discovery's telltale sign is found in the ratio of an isotopic form of hydrogen, deuterium, to standard hydrogen. The ratio in the Earth's water and in water from specks of volcanic glass trapped in crystals within moon dust match the ratio found in the chondrites. The proportions are far different from those in comet water.