News Articles

Gravity does funny things.   While the Earth looks rather round in pictures from space, the distortions that would have to occur in order to have uniform gravity everywhere would make it look more like...a potato, or a squashed basketball.ESA's GOCE satellite has gathered enough data to map Earth's gravity with unrivaled precision, and so we get the most accurate model of the 'geoid' ever produced.  The geoid is the surface of an ideal global ocean in the absence of tides and currents, shaped only by gravity. It is a crucial reference for measuring ocean circulation, sea-level change and ice dynamics.  

Open access, where scientists pay a fee to publish so that the public and other scientists can read the study for free, is a negligible issue to most scientists, according to a new research report in The FASEB Journal.

The eastern continental boundaries of America and Asia are colder than the same latitudes on their western boundaries -  no one thinks of Barcelona or London as colder than New York City but they are both north of the Big Apple.   I think any of us would trade a NYC winter for a Barcelona one.   Mountain ranges and warm ocean currents are the likely culprits, according to recent hypotheses.

While the current radiation concerns in Japan are not on a par with atomic bombs, the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki can provide some insight into what effects, if any, radiation might have on residents of Japan today.

A review article in the latest issue of Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness (free to read - http://www.dmphp.org) looks at risk estimates and summarizes what has been learned from following the survivors for 63 years. 

Depression erodes intimate relationships not just by making one person withdrawn, needy, or hostile, but also because it impairs a depressed person's ability to perceive the others' thoughts and feelings. It impairs what psychologists call "empathic accuracy" and that can exacerbate alienation, depression in a vicious cycle.

A clay tablet discovered Greece changes what is known about the origins of literacy in the western world, obviously a good thing, and, unfortunately, also about the origins of bureaucracy.    Measuring 2 inches by 3 inches, the tablet fragment is the earliest known written record in Europe, dating back to between 1450 and 1350 B.C., 100-150 years before the tablets from the Petsas House at Mycenae.

Across the world, fewer people are buying the "I have a glandular disorder" excuse for obesity.As the average waistline increases but the numbers of obese people skew that result, society is getting less tolerant of heavier folk - even in cultures where being big is considered better, according to a cross-cultural study of attitudes toward obesity to be published in the April issue of Current Anthropology.The study didn't test what is driving the shift in attitude, but the researchers say that "newer forms of educational media, including global public health campaigns" may be playing a role.

Future firefighters may use electricity instead of water to control flames, according to results of a discovery that could underpin a new genre of fire-fighting devices, including 'sprinkler' systems that suppress fires not with water, but with zaps of electric current. 

You may have heard of a new car with lots of problems referred to as a 'lemon' but not all fruits are bad when it comes to automobiles.  Scientists in Brazil have developed a more effective way to use fibers from these and other plants in a new generation of automotive plastics that are stronger, lighter, and more eco-friendly than plastics now in use, according to their presentation at the National Meeting&Exposition of the American Chemical Society. 

Ginseng and saffron are sexual performance boosters, according to a new scientific review of natural aphrodisiacs, but while the more obscure Spanish fly and Bufo toad are purported to be sexually enhancing, they produced the opposite result and can even be toxic.    Wine and chocolate are okay, though it's all in your head, say the findings by Massimo Marcone, a professor in Guelph's Department of Food Science, and master's student John Melnyk in Food Research International.

University of Utah scientists have used invisible infrared light to make rat heart cells contract.  Sounds interesting but not revolutionary, right?   But they also used infrared light to cause toadfish inner-ear cells to send signals to their brain - which might improve cochlear implants for deafness.

Researchers have discovered a 525-million-year-old fossil which belongs to a group of tentacle-bearing creatures which lived inside hard tubes. The creature belongs to a group called pterobranch hemichordates which are related to starfish and sea urchins but also show some characteristics that offer clues to the evolution of the earliest vertebrates. About 30 species of pterobranch are known to exist today although 380-490 million years ago a group of these animals called graptolites were common across the prehistoric oceans.