News Articles

How do we 'experience' our own bodies?     It has long been believed that our body image is limited by our innate body plan, so we cannot truly experience having more than one head, two arms and two legs but brain scientists at the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet say they have shown that it is possible to make healthy volunteers experience having three arms at the same time.

A new dinosaur named Brontomerus mcintoshi, 'thunder-thighs' to its discoverers because of its powerful thigh muscles, has been described in a paper in the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica. A member of the long-necked sauropod group of dinosaurs which includes Diplodocus and Brachiosaurus, Brontomerus may have used its powerful thighs as a weapon to kick predators, or less interestingly, to help travel over rough terrain. Brontomerus lived about 110 million years ago, during the Early Cretaceous Period, and probably had to contend with fierce raptors such as Deinonychus and Utahraptor.

Patients with Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome age eight to 10 times faster than the rest of us and rarely live beyond 13 years. Almost all of the patients die from complications of arteriosclerosis, the clogging or hardening of arteries or blood vessels caused by plaques, which leads to heart attack and stroke.Research on Progeria is difficult because the disease is exceedingly rare and only 64 children living with progeria are known, making access to patients very difficult.

Think all Republicans are anti-science or religious people are stupid?  You may look for data to rationalize your bias but a new study in Psychological Science says it may just be your own low self-esteem; when people are feeling badly about themselves, they're more likely to show bias against people who are different from them.  Jeffrey Sherman of the University of California, Davis, who wrote the study with Thomas Allen, used the Implicit Association Test (IAT), a task designed to assess people's automatic reactions to words and/or images, to investigate this claim.

Supernova remnant Cassiopeia A (Cas A) is the remains of a massive star 11,000 light years away that would have appeared to explode about 330 years ago as observed from Earth.Neutron stars like Cas A contain the densest known matter that is directly observable. One teaspoon of neutron star material weighs six billion tons. The pressure in the star's core is so high that most of the charged particles, electrons and protons, merge resulting in a star composed mostly of uncharged particles called neutrons.

Concerns about geomagnetic storms are all the rage this week, so what are they? A geomagnetic storm is a disturbance in the magnetosphere due to near-Earth space weather that happens when the interplanetary magnetic field turns southward and remains that way.

A new study accepted for publication in Chemical Geology says deep saline groundwaters in South Africa's Witwatersrand Basin may have remained isolated for perhaps millions of years.The Witwatersrand Basin covers approximately 400 kilometers, some of which is subcrop of the Witwatersrand Supergroup sedimentary and sub-ordinate volcanic sequences and is well-known for tourist expeditions to search for gold.The researchers found the noble gas neon dissolved in water in three-kilometer deep crevices and the unusual neon profile, along with the high salinities and some other unique chemical signatures, is very different from anything seen in molten fluid and gases rising from beneath the Earth's crust.

If you've been to Bible study classes, you know the story of Jericho.   Actually, if you're an atheist you may know it even better, since on quizzes atheists seem to know The Bible better than many religious people.  In the story, Joshua, successor to Moses, led the Jews across the Jordan to what would be their land.   Jericho was clearly sitting on it so using trumpets for seven days and finally their voices they were able to take out the walls of the city and kill most everyone inside.Wait until the Mythbusters try and tackle that one.   

Researchers have discovered a genetic variant that allows a fish in the Hudson River to live in waters heavily polluted by polychlorinated biphenyls - PCBs. In their report,  they show that a population of Hudson River fish apparently evolved rapidly in response to the toxic chemicals, which were first introduced in 1929, and were banned fifty years later. PCBs were once used in hundreds of industrial and commercial applications, especially as electrical insulators. 

After 50 years, laser technology is still advancing.  Scientists at Yale University have announced  the world's first anti-laser, in which incoming beams of light interfere with one another in such a way as to perfectly cancel each other out, a breakthrough that sounds academic but could pave the way for new applications in optical computing and radiology.Conventional lasers, which were first invented in 1960, use a so-called "gain medium," usually a semiconductor like gallium arsenide, to produce a focused beam of coherent light—light waves with the same frequency and amplitude that are in step with one another.

Sometimes good things result from bad things.  When scientists drilling near an Icelandic volcano hit magma, they had to abandon their experiments on geothermal energy but it turns out they may have discovered an alternative source of geothermal power.When tested, the magma well produced dry steam at 750 degrees Fahrenheit , enough to generate up to 25 megawatts of electricity, which could power 25,000 to 30,000 homes.  Fine, fine, but what does that mean?  Only 5 to 8 megawatts are produced by a typical geothermal well, and Iceland already gets about one-third of its electricity and almost all of its home heating from geothermal sources, but this is a terrific new source.

The skeletal hormone osteocalcin also, boosts testosterone production to support the survival of the germ cells that go on to become mature sperm, say researchers writing in Cell.Bone was once thought of as a "mere assembly of inert calcified tubes" but in the last ten years, scientists have gained a much more dynamic picture of bone as a bona fide endocrine organ with links to energy metabolism and reproduction.