News Articles

Sex helps in multiple ways, it seems.  New research presented at The Gerontological Society of America's meeting, based on 2004 General Social Surveys, found that the more often older married individuals engage in sexual activity, the more likely they are to be happy with their lives and marriages.Based on the survey responses of 238 married individuals age 65 years or older, the research showed that frequency of sexual activity was a significant predictor of both general and marital happiness. The association even remained after accounting for factors such as age, gender, health status, and satisfaction with financial situation.

Researchers have developed what they are billing as the world’s lightest material. With a density of 0.9 mg/cc, it is about one hundred times lighter than Styrofoam™. The new material redefines the limits of lightweight materials because of its unique “micro-lattice” cellular architecture, they say - consists of 99.99 percent air by designing the 0.01 percent solid at the nanometer, micron and millimeter scales.  The material’s architecture allows unprecedented mechanical behavior for a metal, including complete recovery from compression exceeding 50 percent strain and extraordinarily high energy absorption.

The development of simple tests to predict a leukemic relapse in young patients has come a step closer. Approximately 20 percent of young leukemia patients who are treated with stem cells derived from umbilical cord blood will experience leukemic relapse but new research findings published in Blood demonstrate that the blame falls partially on T cells, a subset of white blood cells. The researchers analyzed blood samples from young children who received an umbilical cord blood transplant for the treatment of blood disorders, including leukemia. They were particularly interested in studying the three to six month time period post-transplantation, when the children were most susceptible to both relapse and infection.

New research in Nature has a surprising conclusion; the impact of deforestation on global warming varies with latitude, which at least explains a frustrating lack of warming in the U.S. even though global warming has been measured higher overall.The researchers calculated that north of Minnesota, or above 45 degrees latitude, deforestation was associated with an average temperature decrease of 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit. On the other hand, deforestation south of North Carolina, or below 35 degrees latitude, appeared to cause warming. Statistically insignificant cooling occurred between these two latitudes.

Sheesh, it isn't even Thanksgiving but companies are already advertising Top Ten Lists?  When will it end? 

There are still 37 shopping days until Christmas but The Sunday Times already has its top ten gadgets of 2011 list up. Compiled by their technology panel, the results will also be featured in the inaugural Tech List supplement within the main newspaper this weekend. To coincide with the launch, consumer research was conducted looking at gadget and technology trends together with spending plans this Christmas. 

A group of researchers has created a model they say can identify and predict how multiple relationships form in social networks. The nuance, they say, is that multiple, distinct types of relationships often occur among users of the same network and existing models that explain how relationships form in a network don't account for these variations. As an example, they note that when people connect with each other through networks, they connect via multiple relationships. Two Facebook users may be "friends" but may not regularly communicate with each other directly and a user commenting on another's profile or otherwise actively communicating represents a different type of relationship in the network.

Why do flies like beer?  It's sweeter than you think.  Entomologists say the flies sense glycerol, the sweet-tasting compound that yeasts make during fermentation.The researchers examined the feeding preference of the common fruit fly for beer and other products of yeast fermentation, and found that a receptor - a protein that serves as a gatekeeper - called Gr64e is associated with neurons located in the fly's mouth is instrumental in signaling a good taste for beer.Once a fly has settled on beer, Gr64e detects glycerol and transmits this information to the fly's neurons, which then influences the fly's behavioral response. Flies use other receptors in their sensory organs to find food from a distance.

Researchers are saying that the perception of nude bodies is boosted at an early stage of visual processing. So it may be an overlap with the culturally forbidden nature of scantily clad or nude figures as the driving force behind its appeal in areas as diverse as sexual arousal, art and advertising.  Brain imaging studies have localized areas in the brain which are specialized in detecting human bodies in the environment, but it was unknown whether the brain processes nude and clothed bodies in different ways. Researchers at the University of Tampere and the Aalto University, Finland, have now shown that the perception of nude bodies is boosted at an early stage of visual processing.

Cosmic particle accelerators may be more efficient than previously thought, according to a discovery which has revealed the initial stages of acceleration for the first time.In space, large magnetic fields guide cosmic rays across the Universe at almost the speed of light, but they don't start them moving in the first place.  And you need some way to begin the acceleration process. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN uses a series of small accelerators to get its particles up to speed before injecting them into the main 27 km-circumference ring for further acceleration. 

Bethesda Softworks' "The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim" has enjoyed an enthusiastic reception by gamers across the globe. After shipping seven million units of Skyrim for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC, Skyrim's launch units are expected to generate more than $450 million in global retail sales. 

VocalWall LTD has released a tool to post private vocal messages on Facebook and other social networks. Traditionally, text messaging has been the sole form of private communication. 

You know them you hate them, but no one creates fun research that matches confirmation bias more than BeautifulPeople.com, and they are at it again.  Their latest findings - from online dating site users, of course - exposes an ugly truth of online dating: Women lie more than men, and Americans are bigger liars than the Brits.

 Women lie about their looks and men lie about their jobs in the battle to find a partner through Internet dating, according to a survey of 1,000 single adults commissioned by BeautifulPeople.com.