News Articles

We've all had an Asian person say, 'All you Americans look alike' - but they aren't being racist, there may be some biology at work.The brain works differently when memorizing the face of a person from one's own race, according to a study which used EEG recordings to measure brain activity and which may shed light on one of the most replicated psychology findings - that people are less likely to remember a face from a racial group different from their own.

If you pay a lot of taxes and get little to show for it, you don't have much trust in government, but if you are in a disaster-prone area, you have more confidence in government than most, say researchers in the International Journal of Wildland Fire.

Here's a way to make the bloated costs of health care reform seem more palatable to opponents - it will knock 220,000 illegal immigrants out of the health care system just in California alone.A new policy brief from the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research says up to 20 percent of all uninsured children in California are those of illegal immigrants, but even some who are here legally may not apply because of confusing rules in The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA) , known colloquially, thanks to pundits like Bill Maher and detractors in the debate, as ObamaCare. 

Too lazy to exercise?  In a world full of concern about global warming and estrogen in rivers and anti-vaccine hippies trying to bring back polio, science has some good news for a change; even if you are sedentary, a glass of red wine may offset some of the effects just like exercise would.A new study in the FASEB Journal suggests that resveratrol in red wine may prevent the negative effects of a sedentary lifestyle, which is good news for couch potatoes and even astronauts. The report describes experiments in rats that simulated the weightlessness of spaceflight, during which the group fed resveratrol did not develop insulin resistance or a loss of bone mineral density, as did those who were not fed resveratrol. 

According to an astrophysicist at UC Santa Barbara, 'zombie' stars may be a way to measure dark energy.   Type Ia supernovae are stars that have been observed since 1054 A.D., when an exploding star formed the crab nebula, a supernova remnant.Theoretical dark energy should make up about three-fourths of the universe, says Andy Howell, adjunct professor of physics at UCSB and staff scientist at Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope (LCOGT).

An article in Marine Ecology Progress Series found evidence of plastic waste in more than nine percent of the stomachs of fish collected during a recent voyage by graduate students from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego to the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre - also known as the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch.". Based on their evidence, authors Peter Davison and Rebecca Asch estimate that fish in the intermediate ocean depths of the North Pacific ingest plastic at a rate of roughly 12,000- to 24,000 tons per year.

As airplanes fly through clouds, they can punch holes through those with supercooled water, or water that has remained in liquid form below its freezing point and researchers are now saying this phenomenon can lead to increased snowfall around the world's major airports. The effect is similar to cloud seeding, which has been controversially used past to influence precipitation, but a new study in Science says that private and commercial flights have been drilling holes and canals through clouds all along, influencing the snow and rainfall below them.

Using the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource, researchers have examined two fossilized birds, Gansus yumenensis and
Confuciusornis sanctus. Confuciusornis sanctus , which lived 120 million years ago, was one of many evolutionary links between dinosaurs and birds, sporting the first known bird-like beak. Gansus yumenensis, considered the oldest modern bird, lived more than 100 million years ago and looked a bit like a modern grebe.

How easy is it to falsify memory?  Perhaps as easy as a little bit of social pressure, according to research at the Weizmann Institute. In a forthcoming Science study, they show a unique pattern of brain activity when false memories are formed – one that hints at a surprising connection between our social selves and memory.The experiment took place in four stages. In the first, volunteers watched a documentary film in small groups. Three days later, they returned to the lab individually to take a memory test, answering questions about the film. They were also asked how confident they were in their answers. 

You know a problem is real when academics say they don't need 5 more years of funding to know what is going to happen.  But that's the situation in the Great Lakes and the threated posed by Asian carp, according to Bill Taylor, University Distinguished professor in global fisheries sustainability at Michigan State University .    "The costs of hydrological separation are high, but it's a one-time expense and remediation in the Great Lakes from these invasive species will eventually make separation look cheap."

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s federal regulatory process is stifling commercial investment in the development of genetically engineered animals for food, warns a task force led by a U.C. Davis animal scientist, and that could have serious implications for agriculture and food security in the United States.Clouding the science issues are anti-science opposition groups that seek to delay or obstruct approval by co-opting regulations and concerns about labeling requirements.  The FDA does not require that food labels include information about production methods, such as genetic engineering or organic processes, unless those processes result in a material difference in the product. 

A quasar named

ULAS J1120+0641, powered by a black hole with a mass two billion times that of the Sun, is by far the brightest object yet discovered in the early Universe - yet.