News Articles

Biogeochemists say new evidence linking glacial events during the "Snowball Earth" period to the rise of early animals. The controversial Snowball Earth hypothesis, which originated in 1964 due to the discovery of glacial deposits near the equator, posits that on several occasions the Earth was covered from pole to pole by a thick sheet of ice lasting for millions of years.   These glaciations, far more severe than the usual Ice Ages, occurred from 750 to 580 million years ago, and in their aftermath, the oceans were rich in phosphorus, a nutrient that controls the abundance of life in the oceans, according to new research.

Sharpening tools is no easy task.  If you've ever tried to do it yourself you know that prehistoric man had to have developed real skill to sharpen stone tools - using pressure flaking, no less.Pressure flaking is a technique where implements shaped by hard stone hammers strikes and then softer wood or bone strikes are carefully trimmed by directly pressing the point of a tool made of bone on the edges of the tool.   A new study says pressure flaking was being used at Blombos Cave in South Africa during the Middle Stone Age by anatomically modern humans and involved the heating of silcrete (quartz grains cemented by silica) used to make tools. 

Unless you live in a remote mountain cabin, you might never be without an Internet connection in the world of the future.   Members of the public could form the backbone of powerful new mobile networks, by wearing sensors being researched at Queen's University Belfast. According to researchers, the sensors could create new ultra high bandwidth mobile internet infrastructures and reduce the density of mobile phone base stations.    The engineers from Queen's Institute of Electronics, Communications and Information Technology (ECIT), are working on a new project based on the new science of "body-centric" communications. 

As a result of a global health campaign, polioviruses have almost been eradicated in many areas of the world but enterovirus 71 is closely related to poliovirus and was first detected in California in the 1960s. Since then the virus has spread across Asia, affecting mostly children and some adults. Serious cases of the disease can include neurological disorders such as meningitis, paralysis and encephalitis.

Can there be a genetic difference between progressives and conservatives?   Certainly we have had the discussion many times about studies, both sociological and biological, seeking to make the case that politics might be nature as well as nurture.

A new paper suggests that instead of some primates evolving in Africa and spreading out from there, they colonized it, likely from Asia.   The search for data regarding the origins of man's earliest anthropoid ancestors is obviously one of the most hotly pursued subjects in paleontology.

Men and women are different, we know that now (efforts to the contrary in the 1970s aside) but when it comes to neuroscience, differences may be speculation, no matter how many studies you read saying this imaging study or that is correlated to a hypothesis.

President Obama's director of the National Economic Council, Lawrence Summers, made no friends among women when, as president of Harvard, he tried to have a discourse about gender differences in the higher levels of math-intensive fields.    He quickly learned that speculation and conjecture are best left to philosophy undergraduate classes and actual women in academia don't much care what he thinks about their abilities.

New research from a four-year study shows that 'gender bending' chemicals which find their way from human products into rivers and oceans can have a significant impact on the ability of fish to breed, which could have important implications for ecosystem health and possibly humans.Endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) disrupt the ways that hormones work in the bodies of vertebrates, including humans.    They can be found in everything from female contraceptive drugs and hormone replacement therapy pills to cleaning soap - most well studied EDCs are those that mimic estrogen.

Quantum cryptography is the technology of the future for military and financial organizations because it sends information as entangled particles of light - anyone who tries to tap into the information changes it in a way that reveals their presence.The data is encoded with an encrypted key but one important limitation is range.  The longest distance over which an encrypted key can be sent is approximately 100 kilometers but new technology developed by researchers increases 30-fold the amount of time the memory can hold information, which means that a series of quantum repeaters, arrayed like Christmas lights on a string, could reach distances in excess of 1,000 kilometers.

Do you fall in love using your heart or your brain?   It depends.    For your brain, says a new analysis by Syracuse University Professor Stephanie Ortigue that won't discourage drug use, falling in love elicits the same euphoric feeling as using cocaine,  but it also affects intellectual areas of the brain.  That's a pretty big endorsement of the brain being number one in romance.So if love is in the brain and not the heart, is there 'love at first sight' after all?   The science says yes, according to the researchers, who found falling in love only takes about a fifth of a second. 

Can skin cancer be treated with light? Scientists from the University of California, Irvine say they can treat skin cancer with light - the ability to image cancerous lesions using LEDs might advance a technique for treating cancer called photodynamic therapy (PDT).In PDT, photosensitizing chemicals that absorb light are injected into a tumor, which is then exposed to light. The chemicals generate oxygen radicals from the light energy, destroying the cancer cells. PDT is currently approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of esophageal and lung cancer.