News Articles

Anthropogenic climate change is so anthropomorphic.  While we think we have a mighty impact on the atmosphere, sauropod dinosaurs millions of years ago shouldn't be left out of the pollution hall of fame - they alone could have produced enough methane to warm the climate many millions of years ago, according to a numerical model.Like CO2, methane is a greenhouse gas, but with 23X the warming impact of CO2. It's produced by dying plants and cow burps - and cows share one thing in common with hulking sauropods, distinctive for their enormous size and unusually long necks, that were widespread about 150 million years ago. As in cows, methane-producing microbes aided the sauropods' digestion by fermenting their plant food.

Among cancer deaths worldwide, lung cancer is the leader. It isn't just the tumor cells, the growth of blood vessels controls tumors development and blood vessel growth is controlled by several signalling molecules. Scientists have discovered a molecule, phosphodiesterase PDE4, that plays a key role in this process and they have succeeded in reducing tumor growth in their experiments by blocking it.

Stars live for a long time - millions of years - but near the end of their lives, some massive stars go through what astronomers call the yellow supergiant phase. Because the timeframe is so short, cosmically, witnessing a yellow supergiant phase is rare - almost as rare as a Kardashian staying married when ratings slip.  Like with celebrity relationships, if you want to witness the big meltdown you have to stay vigilant in astronomy. And keep your camera running.

The iconic Coelacanth are fish well-known as ‘living fossils’. Coelacanths were thought to have died out with the dinosaurs and then a living one was caught off the coast of South Africa in 1938, sending waves of excitement throughout the scientific world. 

Clinical studies, the central means by which preventive, diagnostic, and therapeutic strategies are evaluated,  that were registered between 2007-2010 were dominated by small, single-center trials and contained significant heterogeneity (different in nature, difficult to compare) in methodological approaches, including the use of randomization, blinding, and data monitoring committees, according to an analysis in JAMA. 

Giant flea-like animals, possibly the oldest of their type ever discovered, bit creatures much larger than they are 165 million years ago - and lived to talk about it.These flea-like animals, were similar to modern fleas but 10 times the size of a flea you might find crawling on your family dog – with a proboscis and an extra-painful bite to match.  Dinosaurs were likely not amused.

A new imaging study shows the brains of embryonic chicks can 'wake' long before chicks are ready to hatch out of their eggs - but it took loud, meaningful sounds. Playing meaningless sounds wasn't enough to rouse their brains.As modern medicine continues to push back the gestational age at which prematurely born infants can reliably survive, pediatricians have worried about the effects of stimulating brains that are still 'under construction'. It turns out that,like adult brains, embryo brains also have neural circuitry that monitors the environment to selectively wake the brain up during important events.

Our solar system is believed to be around 4.5 billion years old, but it's difficult to know how long it actually took to form.  The reason is, basically, our 'clocks'.  Establishing chronologies of past events or determining ages of objects require having clocks that 'tick' at different paces - nuclear clocks used for dating are based on the rate of decay of an atomic nucleus expressed by a half-life, which is the time it takes for half of a number of nuclei to decay, a property of each nuclear species. Radiocarbon dating is the most famous. It was invented in Chicago in the late 1940s and can date artifacts back to prehistoric times because the half-life of radiocarbon (carbon-14) is a few thousand years. 

If a species´ reproductive strategy is evolutionarily adapted to the environmental constraints encountered by that species in its natural habitat, such as availability of food resources and predictability of the environment, and the aim generally is to produce the largest possible number of surviving offspring under particular conditions, then common dormice are defying that just a little.

In western countries there are 20 times more people aged 65 years andr older than one hundred years ago. With those demographic changes have come changes in brain research.  Understanding the mechanisms responsible for aging-related changes in cognitive processes, including spatial orientation, has become especially important for people’s everyday lives.

While cold fusion remains a pipe dream, fusion as an energy source for the future continues to be funded and improved. In nuclear fission, current nuclear energy, the nucleus of an atom is split, but in fusion two lightweight atoms join together.  The biggest benefit is no explosion.The ITER project is seeking to turn nuclear fusion into reality and is making use of the Tokamak reactor for this purpose. Reactors of this type and the plasma used in them to carry out fusion have a number of control problems, and to solve them, electronics engineer Goretti Sevillano has come up with some tools in her thesis defended at the University of the Basque Country.

Researchers have discovered a previously unknown particle composed of three quarks in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator. The baryon known as Xi_b^* confirms fundamental assumptions of physics regarding the binding of quarks. The baryon family refers to particles that are made up of three quarks and quarks form a group of six particles that differ in their masses and charges. The two lightest quarks, “up” and “down” quarks, form the two atomic components, protons and neutrons. All baryons that are composed of the three lightest quarks (“up”, “down” and “strange” quarks) are known. Only very few baryons with heavy quarks have been observed to date. They can only be generated artificially in particle accelerators, as they are heavy and very unstable.