News Articles

A new annual analysis has again attempted to determine whether society can achieve something similar to the a Rousseaunian social contract. In order to do this, the economists carried out an experiment that reproduced in a laboratory setting some of the important characteristics of the welfare state. 

We know brain activity changes many times over the course of a day. When listening, this oscillation synchronizes to the sounds we are hearing. Not only that, say researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, this oscillation influences the way we listen. Hearing abilities also oscillate and depend on the exact timing of one’s brain rhythms. This discovery that sound, brain, and behavior are so intimately coupled will help us to learn more about listening abilities in hearing loss and perhaps people who stutter.

Though breast cancer death rates have been in decline for 20 years, black women had higher death rates than other demographics in the newest Centers for Disease Control report covering 2005-2009. Breast cancer remains the most common cancer and is the second leading cause of cancer death among U.S. women, about 40,000 deaths annually.  

Human ancestors were making stone-tipped weapons 500,000 years ago at Kathu Pan 1, an archaeological site in South Africa.  The revelation pushes back the date for manufactured weapons another 200,000 yearsAttaching stone points to spears - hafting - was an important advance in hunting for our early ancestors. Though hafted tools require a great deal of effort to manufacture, a sharp stone point on the end of a spear can increase its killing power and that shows strategic foresight.

The planetary nebula Abell 30 is located 5,500 light-years from Earth and it has given astronomers a lookl at a dying Sun-like star that came briefly back to life after giving up the stellar ghost, mimicking the possible fate our own Solar System faces in a few billion years..  ‘Planetary nebula’ is the name given to the often-concentric shells of stellar material cast into space by dying stars. To astronomers of the 18th century, these objects looked like the colorful ‘blob’ of a planet through their telescopes, and the name stuck. Astronomers now know that as a star with less than eight times the mass of the Sun swells into a red giant towards the end of its life, its outer layers are expelled via pulsations and winds. 

How did Tycho Brahe die?It's been a mystery for over 400 years.  11 days after he took ill, he passed away on October 24th, 1601 and in that wake arose a host of speculations, myths, conspiracies and hypotheses.One persistent theory, that involved both misadventure and claims of murder, was mercury; that he had self-experimented/self-medicated the mercury, or that he was poisoned.In 2010, Brahe was exhumed from his grave in Prague and a Danish-Czech team of researchers has been working to determine the cause of his death. The results of this intensive work now make it possible to rule out mercury poisoning as a cause of death.

Mind Sports has created arguably the most expensive and advanced tournament Scrabble system in the world. It's set to be unveiled at the Prague Mind Sports Festival next month and is a tech-lovers dream. It cost over $25,000 to produce because it utilizes custom-built RFIDs to read the entire Scrabble board almost instantaneously (974 milliseconds), transmitting the information via software to viewers online.

A new image of supernova remnant W44, which combines far-infrared and X-ray data from ESA’s Herschel and XMM-Newton space observatories, shows the aftershock of a stellar explosion rippling through space. W44 is about 10,000 light-years away, in the dense star-forming clouds of the constellation of Aquila, the Eagle, and is one of the best examples of a supernova remnant interacting with its parent molecular cloud.

The Price Revolution in Europe, the runaway inflation that occurred during the years between 1515 to 1650, has been attributed to the sudden influx of silver from Mexico and Peru after discovery of the New World, which led to the decline in the value of of silver, and the growth of the European population and therefore competition for goods, which drove up prices.

The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) drives many of the catastrophic climate events that occur from one year to the next: floods, droughts, wildfires, and hurricanes. However, climate scientists do not yet know how ENSO will respond to climate change. A new multi-century reconstruction of ENSO variability, based on fossil corals from Papua New Guinea, reveals a century-long decline in the number of El Niño events starting in the mid-1500s. It is the first time such a shift in activity has been documented in either modern observations or past reconstructions. This reduced activity coincided with the initiation of an unusually cool period in the Northern Hemisphere called the Little Ice Age (LIA), which continued on into the mid-1800s.

Astronomers have identified a body that is very probably a planet wandering through space -  without a parent star. This is the closest such object to oue Solar System,  a distance of about 100 light-years and its comparative proximity and the absence of a bright star very close to it have allowed the team to study its atmosphere in great detail. Free-floating planets are planetary-mass objects that roam through space without any ties to a star. Possible examples of such objects have been found before but without knowing their ages, it was not possible for astronomers to know whether they were really planets or brown dwarfs,  “failed” stars that lack the bulk to trigger the reactions that make stars shine.

In the Journal of Minimal Access Surgery, a case report details a 46-year-old physically fit female with a history of excessive bleeding and benign growths on her uterus. Her surgery was performed through a two inch-long incision in the belly button, the thinnest part of the abdomen, using the robotic arms in a "chopstick" fashion, said Dr. John R. Lue, Chief of the Medical College of Georgia Section of General Obstetrics and Gynecology at Georgia Health Sciences University, showing that the precision and three-dimensional view provided by robots can enable essentially scar-free surgery for some women needing hysterectomies