News Articles

Access to water is a pressing global issue; the World Health Organization and UNICEF estimate that nearly 900 million people worldwide live without safe drinking water.   Taking a cue from the beetle Stenocara gracilipes, researchers from MIT think one solution to providing water in dry regions may be doing what the Namib beetle does - harvest fog for water.The Namib Desert is on the west coast of Africa and when the morning fog rolls in, the Namib Beetle collects water droplets on its bumpy back, then lets the moisture roll down into its mouth, allowing it to drink.

Nephila, orb web weavers of golden silk traps up to five feet in diameter that snare bats in tropical regions, have a new relative that lived with the dinosaurs 165 million years ago and named it Nephila jurassica.    The previous oldest member of the family found was Cretaraneus vilaltae from Spain and the new find stretches nephila genus evolution back another 130 million years - and to Mongolia, when the north China block was part of the Pangaeasupercontinent.Nephila jurassica is also only the second female fossil nephilid to be described.

A new study says that an individual’s intestinal bacteria flora organizes itself in certain clusters and they hypothesize this intestinal bacteria flora will have an influence on how we react to diet and medicine absorbed through the gastro-intestinal tract.

Dieting is hard work.  While ingesting the calories to gain weight is simple, the loss of those calories and the mental 'hunger' and the exercise it requires is no small thing.Given that, it's no surprise dieters who look for healthy food choices are happy to suspend disbelief it it allows them to abdicate responsibility to a menu in a restaurant - and so they are more likely than non-dieters to choose unhealthy foods that are labeled as healthy, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. It seems that dieter focus on food names can work to their disadvantage.

Ozone is a known pollutant at low levels in the earth’s atmosphere, which causes harmful effects on the respiratory system and sensitive plants.    Ozone forms as hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides emitted into the air react with sunlight. Two of the largest emitters of these pollutants are vehicles and electricity generating units (EGUs) but as Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEVs) have risen in popularity over the past decade the positive impact on the environment due to lack of fossil fuel exhaust fumes is offset by increased ozone.

Children eat fewer Easter eggs during the Easter holidays if parents let them decide how many they can have, according to Saima Ehsan and colleagues from the University of Surrey, who will present their research at the British Psychological Society's Annual Conference in Glasgow May 4th-6th.

When black holes slam into each other, the warping of space and time must be so complicated that physicists haven't been sure how to understand the details of what goes on, but by combining theory with computer simulations, Kip Thorne, Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, Emeritus, at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and colleagues say they have developed conceptual tools they've dubbed tendex lines and vortex lines. 

Wikipedia is commonly derided as inaccurate and partisan but, at least when it comes to verifiable facts (rather than slant) that isn't the case, at least in political biographical information.Brigham Young University political scientist Adam Brown focused on past and present candidates for governor across the 50 states. Brown fact-checked biographical information and voting statistics and found very few inaccuracies.  When Brown conducted the study, Wikipedia contained articles for 230 of the 246 major-party candidates that ran for governor between 1998 and 2008. Brown found that all of the verifiable biographical information in those articles was completely accurate. 

Acupuncture is advocated by some for pain control but there are doubts about its effectiveness and its safety.   Investigators from the Universities of Exeter&Plymouth (Exeter, UK) and the Korea Institute of Oriental Medicine (Daejeon, South Korea) evaluated systematic reviews of acupuncture in order to explore the issue. Their analysis in PAIN concluded there is little convincing evidence that acupuncture is effective in reducing pain and serious adverse effects continue to be reported.

A group of patients withneurodegenerative diseases have helped researchers discover a neurological basis of embarrassment.    The thumb-sized bit of tissue in the right hemisphere of the front part of the brain is called the pregenual anterior cingulate cortex and they found the link using...karaoke.They recorded people belting out "My Girl" – the 1964 hit by The Temptations - and then asked them to listen to their own singing without the accompanying music.   The degree to which the singers were embarrassed in hearing themselves sing depended on the integrity of the pregenual anterior cingulate cortex region.

You know this already - given sufficient forward speed, a bicycle pushed sideways will not fall over. Since the bicycle was invented, scientists have postulated various reasons as to why a bicycle is self stable above a certain speed.  The consensus has been that a bicycle's stability is related to two factors:  First, the rotating wheels of the bicycle provide stability through gyroscopic effects; secondly, that the ‘trail’, the distance by which the contact point of the front wheel trails behind the steering axis, plays an important part. 

A new study of the eyes of fossil animals in Science overturns the conventional wisdom that dinosaurs were active by day while early mammals moved at night.  Instead, dinosaurs like velociraptor hunted by night while the big plant-eaters browsed around the clock.