News Articles

Women may regard love and affection and consideration as most important in a mate, but if research in African cichlid fish applies to humans, they are suppressing a more primitive instinct to like winners.  In African cichlid fish, even when a female shows a preference for a male, if witnesses him losing a fight with another male, her feelings toward him change.   Areas of the female's brain associated with anxiety showed increased activity after witnessing an altercation.  Of course, being a winner in the eyes of cognitively diverse human females can take many different forms than pure combat.

Climatology might replace economics as the 'gloomy science'. Projections that the lousy economy might mean a slowdown in fossil fuels were cause for joy among activists, without realizing that people without jobs or food or houses aren't as concerned about abstract things like the future of the planet.Whether or not global warming is a fashionable media topic in 2010, global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, the main contributor to man-made global warming, show no sign of lessening and could still reach a new record this year, according to a study that is part of the annual carbon budget update by the Global Carbon Project.

In a new study, cancer biologists show that restoring the protein p53's function in mice with early lung cancer has no effect in tumor development but restoring p53 function later may prevent more advanced tumors from spreading throughout the body. 

Some of the universe's most massive galaxies may have formed billions of years earlier than current scientific models predict, according to findings in the Astrophysical Journal. That conclusion was drawn because newly identified galaxies were five to ten times more massive than our own Milky Way. They were among a sample studied at redshift 3≤z4, when the universe was between 1.5 and 2 billion years old.

Physicists from the University of Bonn have developed a completely new source of light, a Bose-Einstein condensate consisting of photons, something not known to be possible, which may potentially be suitable for designing light sources resembling lasers that work in the x-ray range. By cooling Rubidium atoms deeply and concentrating a sufficient number of them in a compact space, they suddenly become indistinguishable. They behave like a single huge "super particle." Physicists call this a Bose-Einstein condensate.

This holiday season, starting today when you bite into the cranberry sauce and the tartness smacks your tongue as hard as that snide comment from your sister, consider the power of sour.Neurobiology researchers at the University of Southern California have made a surprising discovery about how some cells respond to sour tastes.Of the five taste sensations — sweet, bitter, sour, salty and umami — sour is arguably the strongest yet the least understood. Sour is the sensation evoked by substances that are acidic, such as lemons and pickles. The more acidic the substance, the more sour the taste.

Neuroscientists have discovered that the brain sees some faces as male when they appear in one area of a person's field of view, but female when they appear in a different location, a finding which challenges the longstanding tenet of neuroscience that how the brain sees an object should not depend on where the object is located relative to the observer.In the real world, the brain's inconsistency in assigning gender to faces isn't noticeable because there are so many other clues, like hair and clothing, but when people view computer-generated faces, stripped of all other gender-identifying features, a pattern of biases based on location of the face emerges.

Researchers have hit on a new way to create a personalized vaccine - an immune response against their own tumors using the tumor itself. This dendritic cell (DC) vaccine was used after surgical resection of metastatic tumors to try to prevent the growth of additional metastases. Dendritic cells are critical to the human body's immune system, helping identify targets, or antigens, and then stimulating the immune system to react against those antigens. The new research grew dendritic cells from a sample of a patient's blood, mixed them with proteins from the patient's tumor, and then injected the mixture into the patient as a vaccine. The vaccine then stimulated an anti-tumor response from T-cells, a kind of white blood cell that protects the body from disease.

We don't know about yours but this holiday season, the homes of most scientists will be awash with even more coffee than usual. And that means coffee ring stains.With the volume of science done in coffee houses (like Newton, who ate his meals in one every day) you'd think that anything about coffee, including coffee rings left behind from spillage, would be studied to death.Not really.   In 1997, Robert Deegan and colleagues showed that the coffee ring pattern was due to capillary flow induced by the differential evaporation rates across the drop (1) but since then little has been done.    Sometimes science is practical instead of informational and 'just use a coaster' is enough.

Classical Cepheid Variables, commonly called Cepheids, are unstable stars larger and much brighter than the Sun which expand and contract in a regular way, taking anything from a few days to months to complete the cycle and the time taken to brighten and grow fainter again is longer for stars that are more luminous and shorter for the dimmer ones.This remarkably precise relationship makes the study of Cepheids one of the most effective ways to measure the distances to nearby galaxies and from there to map out the scale of the whole Universe.

On paper, collaborations seem like a good idea because the costs for one agency or country are lower.  In reality, says a new analysis by the National Research Council, federal agencies should not partner in conducting space and earth science missions unless there is a truly compelling reason to do so and clear criteria are met in advance.

If you were a young person watching "The Empire Strikes Back" and saw Darth Vader clearly being more powerful than everyone else yet not being all that evil - and with Yoda telling Luke how much easier the 'dark side of the force' was, you may have wondered why more people didn't choose it.   Behaving badly required less effort and had no obvious repercussions; Han Solo was going to get the girl anyway and she turns out to be your sister.