News Articles

Oxytocin, dubbed the "cuddle hormone" because of its importance in bonding ,  is best known for its role in childbirth and breastfeeding, and animal studies have shown that it may also be important in monogamous social relationships. Recently, economic research in humans implicated oxytocin in trust and empathy.Additional animal research shows that oxytocin may relieve stress and anxiety in social settings and may be more rewarding than cocaine to new mothers.

It's been the decade of metamaterials, with breakthroughs toward an invisibility cloak occurring every few months.   With conventional materials, light typically travels along a straight line, but with metamaterials, scientists can exploit additional flexibility to create blind spots by deflecting certain parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.  Basically, an image can be altered or made to look like it has disappeared. 

Under certain conditions vapor bubbles can form in fluids moving swiftly over a surface and those bubbles soon collapse with such great force that they can even poke holes in steel and damage objects such as ship propellers and fuel pumps.   

Proteins are the indispensable catalytic workhorses, carrying out the processes essential to life in today's sophisticated organisms, but long ago ribonucleic acid (RNA) reigned supreme.Researchers have produced an atomic picture that shows how two of these very old molecules interact with each other and it provides a rare glimpse into the transition from an ancient, RNA-based world to our present, protein-catalyst dominated world. 

Want to kill about 8,000 hours of your life?   Go to data.gov and start looking around.  In the interest of transparency (well, sometimes - see Recovery Accountability and Transparency meeting not open to the public), the Obama Administration has posted over 270,000 sets of raw data from its departments, agencies, and offices on the World Wide Web. Good luck figuring it out, right?  The best place to hide stuff is in plain sight, skeptics will claim.Nope, some folks at Rensselaer are here to make it simple.

Gad Saad, who likes to link evolution to consumption and marketing phenomena, says the length between the second and fourth finger is an indicator of high levels of prenatal testosterone and therefore risk-taking and potential financial success in adult men. His hypothesis suggests that alpha males may take greater risks in relationships, in sports and in the financial markets, which we all sort of knew because that is the origin of the term 'alpha male'.   

As life expectancies increase, so does the number of elderly people undergoing surgical procedures.    Recently, there has been growing about potential neurotoxicity of anesthetics and their role in post-operative cognitive decline.Alzheimer's Disease(AD) is a devastating disease most commonly found in elderly people. It is manifested by severe memory loss, language problems, impaired decision making and affected activities of daily living.

In vitro fertilization (IVF) has brought children to millions who otherwise had difficulty conceiving so it should be a happy time.   Yet over 20% of women who undergo IVF report symptoms of depression.The belief has been that the common denominator in women who undergo IVF - hormone therapy - is the culprit, but new Tel Aviv University shows that other factors have a large influence in who gets depressed and why and resolving those issues will make the success of the IVF greater.

Children have more energy than adults but why is it that when walking children tire first?   Do kids,  and perhaps even shorter adults, walk differently from taller people or do they tire faster for some other reason?  Max Kleiber's work on resting metabolic rates for different sized animals found that the bigger you are the slower each gram of tissue uses energy, but how and why metabolism is regulated that has been a puzzle.

New X-ray imaging capability at Sandia's Z accelerator may help remove an obstacle in efforts to harness nuclear fusion to generate electrical power from sea water.  More accurate simulations could lead to 'break-even' fusion in the future.Magneto-Rayleigh-Taylor (MRT) instabilities are spoilers that arise wherever electromagnetic forces are used to contract - 'pinch' - a plasma, which is essentially a cloud of ions. The pinch method is the basis of the operation of Z, a dark-horse contender in the fusion race.   A pinch contracts plasma so suddenly and tightly that hydrogen isotopes available from sea water, placed in a capsule within the plasma, should fuse.

Many robot designs are understandably human-looking - they infrequently have legs, since a realistic gait that passes for human is difficult (though see RunBot - Mountaineering Robot and The Science Of A Bionic Woman for the latest) but a torso, a head and arms are common.  Hands, though, are delicate instruments and tough to emulate.But a group of researchers have bypassed traditional notions of robot hand design and created a gripper using coffee and a balloon. 

You're on this website so you obviously know how to read.  And some regard the digital revolution as a monumental one but there was one even greater; the invention of writing itself.If you are in the Chicago area this weekend and keen to learn about how and where writing originated - in not just one place but at four distinct times and places - a panel of  scholars will explore how writing developed in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and Mesoamerica.  The seminar is Saturday, November 13, 2010 at 1:00 pm at the Oriental Institute, Breasted Hall1155 East 58th Street, Chicago, IL.   A reception will follow the symposium at 5 PM.