News Articles

Every magnetic material is divided into magnetic domains, called "Weiss domains" after physicist Pierre-Ernest Weiss, who predicted their existence theoretically more than a hundred years ago. In 1907, he recognized that the magnetic moments of atoms within a bounded domain are equally aligned. 

On Thanksgiving Day, it will be all hugs and football for many people, but inside their mouths one of the biggest wars of the year will be taking place.Streptococcus mutans and other harmful bacteria get their own holiday feast and S. mutans gets to launch one of its biggest assaults of the year on your tooth enamel.  But you have soldiers on your side too, namely cranberries and even wine, say dental researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center

Astronomers using two decades of observations from many telescopes around the world have discovered an unusual star system which looks like, and may even once have behaved like, a game of snooker.  Or billiards, depending on which side of the pond you are on.They looked at a binary star system called NN Serpentis, which is 1670 light years away from Earth. NN Serpentis is actually a binary star system consisting of two stars, a red dwarf and a white dwarf, which orbit each other in an incredibly close, tight orbit. By lucky chance Earth sits in the same plane as this binary star system, so we can we can see the larger red dwarf eclipse the white dwarf every 3 hours and 7 minutes.

Researchers conducting genome-wide association studies say they have discovered 30 new genes determine the age of sexual maturation in women - and many of those genes also act on body weight regulation or biological pathways related to fat metabolism.Menarche, the onset of first menstruation in girls, indicates the attainment of reproductive capacity and is a widely used marker of pubertal timing. Age of menarche varies widely and is highly dependent on nutritional status and early menarche is associated with many adverse health outcomes later in life, including breast cancer, endometrial cancer, obesity, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease, as well as shorter adult stature.

Progressing from crude stone tools to elegant hand axes was a technological leap, but that required the slow, complex process of evolution, says a new study that seeks to explain why it took almost two million years to move from razor-sharp stones to a hand-held stone axe.Researchers have had different theories about why it took early humans more than 2 million years to develop stone axes. Some have suggested that early humans may have had underdeveloped motor skills or abilities, while others have suggested that it took human brains this time to develop more complex thoughts, in order to dream up better tool designs or think about better manufacturing techniques.

The eye is not just a lens that takes pictures and converts them into electrical signals, it is the first part of an elaborate system that leads to "seeing".   As with all vertebrates, nerve cells in the human eye separate an image into different image channels once it has been projected onto the retina and pre-sorted information is then transmitted to the brain as parallel image sequences. 

The ethical issues surrounding unchecked human embryonic stem cell research are not going away any time soon, regardless of which political party occupies Congress or the White House.   Given that, researchers have devised various alternatives and now scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin have added one more.   They have managed to convert amniotic fluid cells into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells). These amniotic fluid-derived iPS cells are hardly distinguishable from embryonic stem cells - however, they 'remember' where they came from.

A new study reveals that ‘introspection’ (thinking about our own thoughts or behavior) is anchored in a specific part of our brain. The research by scientists from the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London examined people’s accuracy when reflecting on decisions they had made.

An exoplanet orbiting a star that entered our Milky Way from another galaxy has been detected by astronomers.  This Jupiter-like planet is unusual because it is orbiting a star nearing the end of its life and could be about to be engulfed by it.   Over the last 15 years, astronomers have detected nearly 500 planets orbiting stars in our cosmic neighborhood, but none outside our Milky Way has been confirmed. The planet has a minimum mass 1.25 times that of Jupiter and is part of the so-called Helmi stream — a group of stars that originally belonged to a dwarf galaxy that was devoured by our galaxy, the Milky Way, in an act of galactic cannibalism about six to nine billion years ago. 

Some studies show that estrogen is 'an elixir for the brain', sharpening mental performance in humans and animals and showing promise as a treatment for disorders of the brain such as Alzheimer's disease and schizophrenia.  And don't get us started on what it's doing to males through pollution.

Atoms of antimatter have been trapped and stored for the first time by the ALPHA collaboration, an international team of scientists working at CERN. ALPHA stored atoms of antihydrogen, consisting of a single negatively charged antiproton orbited by a single positively charged anti-electron (positron). While the number of trapped anti-atoms is far too small to fuel an matter-antimatter reactor (sorry, "Star Trek" fans), this advance brings precision tests of the fundamental symmetries of nature a little closer. Measurements of anti-atoms may reveal how the physics of antimatter differs from that of the ordinary matter that dominates the world we know today. 

A team of researchers has created an alternative to conventional logic gates, demonstrated them in silicon, and dubbed them "chaogates." They used 'chaotic' patterns to encode and manipulate inputs to produce a desired output, in that they selected desired patterns from the infinite variety offered by a chaotic system. A subset of these patterns was then used to map the system inputs (initial conditions) to their desired outputs. It turns out that this process provides a method to exploit the richness inherent in nonlinear dynamics to design computing devices with the capacity to reconfigure into a range of logic gates. The resulting morphing gates are 'chaogates'.