News Articles

A group of researchers are contending obese kids may not be the result of lax parenting or a junk-food culture; obesity may have an infectious origin, according to a cross-sectional study by University of California, San Diego School of Medicine researchers who correlate children exposed to a particular strain of adenovirus, human adenovirus 36 (HAdV-36 or AD-36), being significantly more likely to be obese with some causation. 

It's been hard for archaeologists to pin down the extent of idle wealth in ancient people, but it is generally believed only those in the richest locations, like capital cities, had it.   A recent discovery, in an urban context and at an orderly archaeological dig, may be of great significance in learning about ancient people outside large cities.  Most small pieces of art originating in the Near East are of unknown origin, having been displaced through illegal antique trade, or purchased by museums and collectors before scientific archaeological research began, but an ornately designed signet ring of Apollo may lend some insight into the economic state of ancient Phoenicians.

Why does exposure to the name Walmart, a brand typically associated with saving money, reduce subsequent spending, but exposure to the Walmart slogan "Save money. Live better" increase it? ask researchers in a Journal of Consumer Research study.   They delve into a strange facet of consumer behavior: people behave differently when they encounter companies' brands than they do when they encounter their slogans.

We accept that genetics make some people smarter though few consider instead that genes may be making us dumber, but deleting the RGS14 gene in mice did make them smarter - by unlocking a mysterious region of the brain considered to be relatively inflexible, scientists at Emory University School of Medicine have found.Bring on the psychic fans!

The spread of mass panic through Short Message Service (SMS) and text on phones and services like Twitter is unnecessary and people need to learn to look at information with a more critical eye.   People in general are too quick to pass on information without checking - especially if they want to believe what it says - and propagating dubious or false information can have devastating results. 

Mass-panic through technology is not a new phenomenon - in 1938 the first segment of HG Wells' "War of the Worlds" was aired over the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) radio network and as the first episode was done as a simulated news bulletin, many listeners who came on late thought that an actual Martian invasion was taking place.

A group of researchers have developed what are known as vortex beams - rotating electron beams - which make it possible to investigate the magnetic properties of materials and in the future it may be possible to manipulate the tiniest components in a targeted manner and set them in rotation also.Electron beams have been used to analyze materials for a while, such as in electron microscopes. For the most part, the beams' rotation does not affect this analysis because in classical physics, an electron current in a vacuum does not have any orbital angular momentum. But in quantum mechanics, the electrons must be envisaged as a wavelike current, which can rotate as a whole about its propagation direction, similar to the air flow in a tornado.

Obesity is on the rise and one cause for that may be that young people do even less on the weekend than they do during the week - the number of those with inactive lifestyles goes up 100% when they're out of school.   Instead, boys primarily play video games and teenage girls prefer to surf the Internet.The research, which forms part of the European HELENA study, has shown how the proportion of young people who watch television and play on the computer for more than two hours per day doubles at the weekend.

Two popular supplements taken by millions of people around the world to combat joint pain, glucosamine and chondroitin, do not work, according to research published today - but they don't hurt you either.  Basically, they are expensive placebos.Glucosamine and chondroitin are either taken on their own or in combination to reduce the pain caused by osteoarthritis in hips and knees.  The researchers, led by Professor Peter Jüni at the University of Bern in Switzerland, state that although they don't work these supplements are not dangerous - "we see no harm in having patients continue these preparations as long as they perceive a benefit and cover the cost of treatment themselves."

A non-mythological unicorn?   So it seems.   Unicorns have been mentioned throughout history, in mythology and in the works of The Bible and Pliny the Elder's Natural History.    Today the modern westernized unicorn is pure white and hangs out with virgins.In zoology, it is never so simple.In 1992, in Vietnam's Vu Quang Nature Reserve near the country's border with Laos, a spectacular zoological discovery occurred.  A creature with long horns (sorry unicorn fans - two of them) and white facial markings, and resembling the antelopes of North Africa but more closely related to wild cattle, a new species called the Saola was discovered.

A new study in Heart says a combination of depression and heart disease is far more lethal than either one of those condition alone.Depressed people are more likely to die from all causes so it's difficult to narrow down whether or not depressed people with heart disease are at greater risk and people who who are depressed, but otherwise healthy, have been shown to be more likely to develop coronary heart disease, irrespective of what other risk factors they might have. 

On September 16th the 2010 World Solar-Powered Air Conditioning Development Forum was held in Dezhou, a municipality of China's Shandong Province.

What is really happening in apparently empty areas of the Galaxy?   It may get a rethink because scientists have managed to find a molecule that has an unexpectedly complicated structure in interstellar clouds of extremely small density. Translucent interstellar clouds are penetrated by highly energetic ultraviolet and cosmic radiation which should break any chemical species it meets but a group of scientists have managed to observe in those clouds a molecule made up of an unexpectedly large number of atoms: the diacetylene cation; a discovery which may contribute to solving the oldest unsolved puzzle of spectroscopy. The density of translucent interstellar clouds is extremely small.