News Articles

Think you're no good at Chess?   Not a strategic thinker?   You're better at it than you may think.When we make any decisions related to how we think someone else will act,  we must use reason to infer the other's next moves to decide what we must do. This recursive reasoning ability in humans has been thought to be somewhat limited but new research says people can engage in much higher levels of recursive reasoning than was previously thought. 

If an isolated question asks you if you are more inclined to vote for one politician who lies about limiting his campaign financing or one who agrees to use only matching public funds in the interests of campaign finance reform and sticks to it, who would you pick?  Obviously if political campaigns were limited to that one topic, the honest politician would win - but quality leadership incorporates 'negative' personality traits too and President Barack Obama was able to spend double the money on advertising of his opponent because he used that strategy wisely.

A new study says it isn't just human memories that fade - aging impacts the ability of honey bees to find their way home as well.Bees are typically impressive navigators, able to wend their way home through complex landscapes after visits to flowers far removed from their nests, even after three to four days of flight time. Mature bees have piloted their way to and from the hive for five to 11 days and old bees have had more than two weeks of flight time but the paper says that aging impairs the bees' ability to extinguish the memory of an unsuitable nest site even after the colony has settled in a new home. 

Spanning the Kill Van Kull tidal strait and first opened in 1931, the Bayonne Bridge was the longest in the world until 1978 and is currently the fourth longest steel arch bridge in the world.  Today it carries about 20,000 vehicles per day over its four lanes and it was dramatically blown up in the Steven Spielberg-directed 2005 movie "War of the Worlds", starring Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning.In 2002, inspired by the events of the 9/11 terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center, eight-year-old Veronica Granite from New Jersey began a petition drive to illuminate her hometown bridge with red, white and blue lights, having seen tricolor lighting atop the Empire State Building during a visit to Liberty State Park.

Think feminists are angry?   Many zealots in any movement come across as bitter to outsiders but Professor Germaine Greer is giving a talk at the Literary Leicester Festival at the University of Leicester and intends to discuss what enormous fun she has had being a fearless international feminist icon and an academic through four decades of change - witnessing the change from the vaguely "Mad Men" period of the '60s, through the bizarre unisex beliefs of the '70s to today, where women get more PhDs than men but still like to have doors opened for them.

Chemotherapy is extremely valuable in killing cancer cells but also takes surrounding tissue with it.   Micro-scaled photovoltaic devices may one day be used to deliver chemotherapeutic drugs directly to tumors, rendering chemotherapy less toxic to surrounding tissue, according to findings presented at the AVS 57th International Symposium&Exhibition in Albuquerque.

When a NASA rocket slammed into the Moon last fall, scientists knew they would get information about the composition of the lunar soil at the poles that has never been sampled. The findings from that NASA mission, called LCROSS for Lunar CRater Observing and Sensing Satellite, are out, and they are interesting to say the least.The emptied upper stage of a rocket crashed into the Cabeus crater near the Moon's south pole last October. A second spacecraft followed to analyze the ejected debris for signs of water and other constituents of the super-chilled lunar landscape.

A numerical model can't help you finish a marathon, that will take a lot of running, but math can at least help you be the most efficient your body can be.The best part about the night before a marathon is 'carb'ing up' the night before with a healthy pasta dinner but marathoners in training long before that make many mistakes with their diet, assuming "I'm in training" means they can eat twice as much of anything.

A new study in rats says growing up with lots of sisters makes a male less sexy to females, because the sex ratio of a male rat's family while young influences his sexual behavior and therefore how female rats respond to him later.Early life obviously affects later behavior but how early and how much of an impact and how can it be quantified in a less 'soft' fashion.    There are correlation studies that even conclude the position of a fetus in the uterus matters and that a female fetus that spends the pregnancy sandwiched between two brothers grows up to be more masculine because she's been exposed to their hormones.    

Lithium-ion batteries are commonly regarded as promising for the cars of the future (at least until hydrogen fuel cells are ready for prime time) but environmentalists interested in electric or hybrid vehicles are concerned about the acid rain caused by battery manufacturing and high replacement cost for the batteries, which will last about the same as a standard car battery but are a terrific expense.

Astronomers report they have measured the distance to the most remote galaxy and have found that they are seeing it when the Universe was only about 600 million years old (a redshift of 8.6), making those the first confirmed observations of a galaxy whose light is clearing the opaque hydrogen fog that filled the cosmos at this early time. 

comScore, Inc. , a leader in measuring the digital world, today released a study of Internet usage in Russia based on August 2010 data from the comScore Media Metrix service and the data revealed that Russians are the heaviest social networkers worldwide in terms of time spent per user and that Yandex is the leading property in the Russian Federation. 
 Russia #1 Worldwide in Time Spent on Social Networking Sites 
 In August 2010, 34.5 million Russian Internet users (74.5 percent of the online population) visited at least one social networking site.