News Articles

While there are still plenty of mysteries in electromagnetics, electrical engineers are sure of one thing; current is carried through materials by flowing electrons.
 In physics, Luttinger's theorem states that the number of electrons in a material is the same as the number of electrons in all of its atoms added together. Much-studied conducting materials, such as metals and semiconductors, have held true to the idea. 

The term 'elites' gets a bad rap in modern culture, mostly because political pundits use it to mean 'me and people I like' - elitism - rather than understanding what elite means.
Yet in sports we still recognize that there are elites. Don't like Usain Bolt's politics?  Beat him in a race. 
Some new research says that, as much as it might bother us, some elites are elite in many ways. Olympic medalists in volleyball, for example, perform better than the rest of us in how fast their brains take in and respond to new information, even if they are Republicans and social psychologists insist their brains are inferior.

American education reform in the first decade of the 21st century, called No Child Left Behind, resulted in math parity among boys and girls for the first time in history.It may have taken so long because legacy education methods fight biology and not the persistent claims that there is subtle bias (hidden, stereotype threat and other sociological rationalizations), even in countries with high gender equality.  Sex differences in math and reading scores persisted in the 75 nations examined by a University of Missouri and University of Leeds study; girls consistently scored higher in reading, while boys got higher scores in math. Instead of being gender-based, gaps are linked and vary with overall social and economic conditions of the nation. 

One of the most basic laws of quantum mechanics is  the superposition principle - a system can be in more than one state, that is to say it can exist in multiple realities, at once.
This phenomenon exists only until the system is observed or measured in some way way. As soon as such a system is measured, its superposition collapses into a single state. Thus, we, who are constantly observing and measuring, experience the world around us as existing in a single reality.  

 Marsupials represent approximately 6% of all mammal species and include iconic pouched mammals like the kangaroo, wombat and koala. Compared to eutherian mammals like the dog, cow and human, marsupials have ultra-short pregnancies and give birth to very immature, almost embryonic, young that complete most of their development attached to the teat, usually within a pouch.Even kangaroos, the largest extant marsupials, give birth to a newborn that weighs less than one gram and must climb blind and unaided from the birth canal to the pouch. 

A new psychology paper evolution and basic survival techniques adapted by early humans influence the decisions gamblers make when placing bets. 
So if current counseling options for problem gamblers don't work, we can blame biology.
The scholars examined how gamblers made decision after they won or lost. They found that  gamblers relied on their past experiences to predict what might happen in the future. But in games of chance where the outcome is completely random, this strategy doesn't work.

Electrically charged lunar dust near shadowed craters can get lifted above the surface and 'jump' over the shadowed region, bouncing back and forth between sunlit areas on opposite sides.

Ancient rises in sea levels and global warming are partially attributable to cyclical activity below the earth's surface, according to a new analysis of geological studies. 
New York University's Michael Rampino and Carleton University's Andreas Prokoph analysis considers long-term fluctuations in global climate, diversity of marine organisms, and sea level changes, aiming to identify a unifying cause for these changes. While much scientific study has centered on phenomena above the earth's crust, less attention has historically been paid to changes deep inside our planet.

Engineers at the University of Sheffield have been doing some science of rugby - measuring the dynamic friction between the material of the ball and the skin on the fingertips and palm, and the mitts that some players choose to wear under different weather conditions to find the best way to limit the risk of a player fumbling the ball.

In a first, a whale skeleton has been found on the ocean floor near Antarctica, almost a mile below the surface in an undersea crater. With it were at least nine new species of deep-sea organisms thriving on the bones. 

A new paper in Molecular Pharmacology describes how 'reverse pharmacology', enabled by Heptares Therapeutics StaR(R) technology, can be applied to and accelerate GPCR-based drug discovery.
The paper utilized the study of isolated GPCRs locked in conformations that correspond to agonist or antagonist pharmacology, and the elucidation of their respective 3D structures. These StaRs and structures can be used to select and design compounds with specific pharmacologies, such as inverse agonist, partial agonist or full agonist, based on their ability to bind differentially to the agonist and antagonist StaRs. For example a full agonist will preferentially bind to the agonist StaR. 

The Lazarus Project team says they have been able to recover cell nuclei of the extinct gastric-brooding frog, Rheobatrachus silus,
from tissues collected in the 1970s and kept for 40 years in a conventional deep freezer. 
The genome of
Rheobatrachus silus, extinct since 1983, has been revived and reactivated by a team of scientists using
somatic cell nuclear transfer
to implant a "dead" cell nucleus into a fresh egg from another frog species.
 
Rheobatrachus silus is famous for swallowing its eggs, brooded its young in its stomach and giving birth through its mouth. The "de-extinction" project aims to bring the frog back to life.