News Articles

Sunspots are dark spots on the sun, at least as we see them, caused by magnetic activity in the plasma on the surface of Sol.For 200 years scientists have known that they occasional disappear but no one was sure exactly why.   A trio writing in Nature say they have solved the mystery and now can even predict the next time.   Piet Martens, Dibyendu Nandi and Andres Munoz-Jaramillo say they have discovered why sunspots were missing from 2008 to 2010, which coincided with an extra-long "solar minimum" and unusually weak magnetic fields at the sun's poles. The fields are ordinarily much stronger when solar activity is minimal.

Comparing athletes across generations is always difficult - in football, for example, players are bigger and stronger but before the hashmark changes of the early 1970s, when the field truly had a strong and weak side, a running back like Gale Sayers could make opposing defenses look silly despite an ability to break through a nose tackle.

Sugar-sweetened beverages (fruit drinks,soda) are associated with higher blood pressure levels in adults, according to a report in Hypertension: Journal of the American Heart Association.In the International Study of Macro/Micronutrients and Blood Pressure (INTERMAP), for every extra sugar-sweetened beverage drunk per day participants on average had significantly higher systolic blood pressure by 1.6 millimeters of mercury (mm Hg) and diastolic blood pressure higher by 0.8 mm Hg. This remained statistically significant even after adjusting for differences in body mass, researchers said.

Early in the formation of the Earth, some forms of the element chromium separated and disappeared deep into the planet's core, according to a new study in Science.The team studied a class of meteorites called chondrites, which are leftovers from the formation of the solar system more than 4.5 billion years ago.    By making very accurate measurements of chromium isotopes in the meteorites compared to Earth rocks and comparing them to theoretical predictions, the researchers were able to show for the first time that lighter isotopes of chromium preferentially go into the core.   From this the team inferred that some 65 percent of the missing chromium is most likely in the Earth's core.

Up to 12 percent of Americans may get Alzheimer's disease, current statistics say.  In the quest to prevent Alzheimer's, or at least make it manageable like diabetes, a group of researchers are working on a nasally-delivered vaccine that promises to protect against Alzheimer's.  Bonus: It may help prevent strokes also.The new vaccine repairs vascular damage in the brain by using the body's own immune system and, in addition to its prophylactic effect, it can work even when Alzheimer's symptoms are already present, according to the paper in Neurobiology of Aging.

SKIPTON, England, March 1, 2011 - Grotty old beds could be behind a growing epidemic of 'toxic sleep'. 
 A new Sleep Council survey just in time for National Bed Month shows nearly half of us are getting just six hours sleep or less a night. And an alarming four out of five people complain of disturbed or inadequate - 'toxic' - sleep. 
The survey was conducted online by Pollab Ltd between January 26 - 27 2011. 1,030 UK adults (aged 16+) were questioned, the sample being broadly representative of the UK population and demographically broken down by age, gender, region and marital status.

Among environmental activists and their supporters, the use of genetic modification is a bad thing.   Obviously, tomatoes would be the size of our thumbs if our ancestors did not genetically modify plants so research continues.   A group of researchers has announced that plants have for the first time been cloned as seeds, a major step toward making hybrid crop plants that can retain favorable traits from generation to generation - something to which even the most anti-science people can object.

A preliminary study in JAMA (JAMA. 2011;305[8]808-814.) has found that 50-minute cell phone use was associated with increased brain glucose metabolism, a marker of brain activity, in the region closest to the phone antenna, but that is not known to have any clinical significance.

Modern cosmology believes that for the universe to behave as it does, the mass-energy of the universe must be dominated by dark matter and dark energy, though there is no direct evidence for the existence of these invisible components.    Alternate, though unpopular, possibilities are that the current theory of gravity does not suffice to describe the dynamics of cosmic systems.

Athletes will always look for a competitive edge and 'natural' performance enhancements that can escape scrutiny are a frequent goal.    Scientists have found that bovine colostrum can massively reduce gut permeability, otherwise known as 'leaky gut syndrome' and the results may also be applicable to sufferers of heatstroke.Gut disorders induced by exercise are common in runners; the body's response to increased permeability is to clear the gut contents, giving rise to symptoms such as diarrhea to avoid toxins from gut organisms entering the bloodstream, as these lead to heatstroke which can result in damage to the internal organs.

Meteorologists know weather but do they know anything about climate?    Climate scientists may disagree but a new analysis by sociologists shows meteorologists don't think climate scientists know anything either; and they disagree more than ever after 'Climategate' - the release in late 2009 of e-mails between climate scientists in the U.S. and United Kingdom urging each other to bury contrarian studies and frame data to highlight warming trends - and it has undermined belief in global warming and possibly also trust in climate scientists.

Women in science get awards for teaching and service proportional to their numbers but not for research, according to a new Association for Women in Science study funded by the National Science Foundation."Using data in the public domain on 13 disciplinary societies, we found that the proportion of female prizewinners in 10 of these was much lower than the proportion of female full professors in each discipline," they write.    Well, that doesn't really tell much of a story since it is a snapshot - but there is no equivalent Association for Men in Science to argue that men are blocked out of sociology.