News Articles

Some females will do anything to land a mate.   Biologists have described the evolution of the size of a female trait which males prefer when choosing a partner. The study in Evolutionary Biology shows that male cichlid fish prefer females with a larger pelvic fin and that this drives females to grow fins out of proportion with their body size.Sebastian Baldauf from the University of Bonn, Germany, worked with a team of researchers to study the effects of female ornamentation in the African cichlid fish Pelvicachromis taeniatus. He said, “In contrast to the well-known phenomenon of sexual selection influencing male traits, the expression of female ornaments in relation to body size is almost completely unexplored.”

A new study says supplemental brief dynamic therapy in the treatment of patients with obsessive compulsive-disorder with concurrent major depressive disorder who are receiving effective medication has no significant clinical effect on obsessive and depressive symptoms.When obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), a recurring topic is whether psychoanalysis or related brief psychotherapies help and answering that was the goal a study performed by researchers of the University of Torino in the current issue of Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics.

A new study published says that people who think about time become more social and at least plan to spend more time with the people in their lives, while people who think about money fill their schedules with work. Cassie Mogilner of the University of Pennsylvania designed an online experiment where adults from all over the United Statesbconcentrated on money or time.  The volunteers were asked to unscramble a series of sentences; some participants were presented with sentences containing words related to time (e.g., "clock" and "day"), whereas others' sentences contained words related to money (e.g., "wealth" and "dollar"). Next all participants were asked how they planned to spend their next 24 hours.

A systematic review of research into the use of nutritional supplements for the treatment of anxiety disorders says it has found strong evidence for the use of extracts of passionflower or kava and combinations of L-lysine and L-arginine. They pooled the results of 24 studies involving a total of more than 2000 participants, showing that some nutritional and herbal supplements can be effective, without the risk of serious side effects.

Gamblers behave differently during game time and lulls in action such as half-time.   A computer-modeled comparison of their actions says there are corollaries between the actions of gamblers at half-time and people in the stock market.But how do behaviors change when no action is happening?   Unlike the stock market, football gamblers are, more often than not, free of news about the game during half-time. Gamblers are simply left to their own devices which, the researchers suggest, is akin to identifying the complex interactions of stock market traders.

New research by archaeologists from the University of York says that Neanderthals were a lot more compassionate than their reputation as brutish cavemen.How do you chart the 'compassion' of early humans?

Richard F. Heck, Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki have won 2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for  developing new, more efficient ways of linking carbon atoms together to build the complex molecules that are improving our everyday lives - palladium-catalyzed cross couplings in organic synthesis.Basically, it allows researchers to make chemicals easier.   Carbon-based (you called it 'organic' in college) chemistry is the basis of life and has allowed man to explain parts of the world using natural laws but also provided  a stable foundation for functional molecules, which led to revolutionary materials like plastics.

Obviously some things about the Sun's relationship to Earth are known - if we get too close or too far away all life disappears.  But other aspects, like the activity of the Sun related to heating and cooling, are less clear.It has long been known that the Sun's activity waxes and wanes over an 11-year cycle and that as its activity wanes, the overall amount of radiation reaching the Earth decreases. A new study looked at the Sun's activity over the years 2004-2007, when it was in a declining part of its 11-year activity cycle.

Is a 52% chance of winning a prediction?   Well, yes and no.Today begins the Major League Baseball Division Series and New Jersey Institute of Technology associate math professor Bruce Bukiet is back again, performing his analysis of the probability of each team advancing to the League Championship Series.

Evolutionary detectives have used century-old bits of DNA from museum specimens to find a place for the extinct passenger pigeon, Ectopistes migratorius, in the family tree of pigeons and doves, identifying for the first time this unique bird's closest living avian relatives. 

New research is challenging the belief that the planet Neptune knocked a collection of planetoids known as the Cold Classical Kuiper Belt to its current location at the edge of the solar system.The Kuiper Belt is of special interest to astrophysicists because it is a fossil remnant of the primordial debris that formed the planets.  University of Victoria Ph.D. student Alex Parker presented his results at today's meeting of the Division of Planetary Sciences in Pasadena, California.

Today, October 5th, millions of teachers and education workers will be joined by children, young people and parents across the globe to celebrate World Teachers' Day. They will pay tribute to the teaching profession and its unique role - and promote their union. 
 From the global economic crisis which destabilized many developed economies in the last year, to humanitarian disasters such as the earthquake in Haiti and floods in Pakistan, the role of teachers is vital to the social, economic and intellectual rebuilding of communities in which we all live and work.