News Articles

The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass at an accelerating pace, according to a new study in Geophysical Research Letters. The authors suggest these ice sheets are overtaking ice loss from Earth's mountain glaciers and ice caps to become the dominant contributor to global sea level rise.

If you want to win the NCAA College Basketball Tournament office pool and know nothing about basketball, the good news is you have just as much chance as devoted college basketball fans unless you get all crazy about it.   One solution is to try and play it safe by picking all the top seeds in the brackets to make it to the Final Four and then using a back-azimuth strategy to determine the winners among the early games.   But upsets are almost a guarantee in the NCAA Tournament.   So what is the optimum strategy for people without a clue?

Mendeley, which bills itself as the world's largest crowd-sourced research database, today announced the Mendeley API Binary Battle, challenging developers to build an application on top of Mendeley's open database of over 70 million research papers, usage statistics, reader demographics, social tags, and related research recommendations.
The prize?  $10,001. 
Modeled after Last.fm, Mendeley seeks to use its social reference manager and collaboration platform to make research more productive and transparent. This challenge is all about creating applications that open up its academic data to others. 

Some researchers have wondered why a few credibility issues in particular studies (see Marc Hauser in psychology and parts of the IPCC report in 2007 and anything at all related to cold fusion in physics) would damage the image of researchers across an entire discipline.  It's plain old psychology.

Despite what some sociologists want you to believe, it isn't always men doing the objectification of women.  At least on Facebook, some women go out of their way to be noticed.The millenia-old contention that women care more about their appearance and use it in competition is still alive in the digital age.   A new study published in Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking contends that females who base their self worth on their appearance tend to share more photos online and maintain larger networks on online social networking sites. 

While wireless Internet has been wonderful, true wireless devices - with no need for batteries - are the real revolution needed in technology to make a more positive environmental scenario for the future.   We're getting closer.  A doctoral student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has demonstrated a new system that uses ultrasound to simultaneously transmit large quantities of data and power wirelessly, even through thick metal walls like the hulls of ships and submarines.

Booze has likely inspired many an action in researchers but any actual science effect was second order.   No more.   Scientists from the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan found that immersing pellets of an iron-based compound in heated alcoholic beverages for 24 hours greatly increase their superconducting ability.And red wine, which has been shown to have numerous health benefits, is apparently tops in physics experiments as well.

In New York City, you can easily date a different person within a mile of your home for the rest of your life and never come close to duplicating - and that may be why people in New York City have trouble finding relationships, according to a study in Psychological Science.When people have a large number of potential dating partners to select from, say psychologist Alison Lenton of the University of Edinburgh and economist Marco Francesconi of the University of Essex, they respond by paying attention to different types of characteristics – discarding social attributes such as education, smoking status, and occupation in favor of physical characteristics such as height and weight. 

Henry VIII, King of England and founder of the Anglican Church, was basically the Brad Pitt of his day when he was younger.   Charming, attractive and even kind, for a member of the Royal family. Yet he is most remembered for being gluttonous, impaired and executing wives.    What happened?

Thousands of artifacts made from chert, a flint-like rock used to make projectile points and other stone tools, are in some cases so delicate that their only practical use would have been on the water, says Jon Erlandson, professor of anthropology and director of the Museum of Natural and Cultural History at the University of Oregon, who has been conducting research on California's Channel Islands for more than 30 years.

The smartest, and yet most disingenuous thing, the homeopathy industry did was conscript 'natural medicine' as part of its umbrella.    Homeopathy is clearly snake oil whereas natural remedies have worked since man discovered plants.Scientists understand the distinction, even if proponents of homeopathy do not - or pretend they don't, if it will bilk unsuspecting people out of money.    And because scientists understand the value of natural medicine the goal has always been to understand why things work and, when possible, to synthesize them and make them affordable.  

If you saw the film version of "Mamma Mia!" you may have wondered why some of the actors could act, sing and dance and some, clearly, could not.A new study in Current Biology says that people who are fast to learn a simple sequence of finger motions, like a piano piece, or quick to pick up dance numbers, are also those whose brains show large changes in a particular chemical messenger, gamma-aminobutyric acid(GABA), following electrical stimulation.    GABA is important for the plasticity of the motor cortex, a brain region involved in planning, control, and execution of voluntary movements.