News Articles

Some people can sleep through a Who concert while others wake up if a mouse in the yard moves.   A new report in Current Biology says the difference is that sound sleepers show a distinct pattern of spontaneous brain rhythms. During sleep, brain waves become slow and organized and the thalamus, a way station for all types of sensory information except smell, spontaneously engages with the cortex. This interaction can produce transient fluctuations of the brain's electric field visible on the EEG as rhythmic spindles - brief bursts of faster-frequency waves. 

Fotopedia Heritage, in cooperation with the UNESCO World Heritage Centre, has brought together 20,000 photos, illustrating all World Heritage Sites and 3,000 points of interests in a free application for the iPhone and iPad. 
 Fotopedia Heritage is part of Fotopedia, the first collaborative photo encyclopedia. A team led by Jean-Marie Hullot built the application while the Fotopedia community added and curated the photos thus ensuring high relevance and quality. 

Traditional mirrors work by directing the path of photons of light but atoms possessing a magnetic moment can likewise be controlled using a magnetic mirror.  A new study investigates the feasibility of using magnetic domain walls to direct and ultimately trap individual atoms in a cloud of ultracold atoms. 

A team of scientists say they have reconstructed the Earth's climate belts of the late Ordovician Period, between 460 and 445 million years ago, and their study says these ancient climate belts were surprisingly like those of the present.The team of scientists looked at the global distribution of fossils called chitinozoans – probably the egg-cases of extinct planktonic animals – before and during this Ordovician glaciation, and found a pattern that revealed the position of ancient climate belts, including such features as the polar front, which separates cold polar waters from more temperate ones at lower latitudes.

Why are some things funny? Philosophers have asked that for millenia but two marketing people think they've come up with the formula: humor comes from a violation or threat to the way the world ought to be that is, at the same time, benign. Most theories of humor are missing something, says A. Peter McGraw, assistant professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Colorado-Boulder, who co-authored the study with Caleb Warren, a Ph.D. candidate in marketing. Freud thought humor came from a release of tension, another theory holds that humor comes from a sense of superiority, and still another from incongruity.

Can neuroscience help a magazine sell more copies?   New Scientist wants to find out, so they teamed up with NeuroFocus, who bill themselves the world's largest neuromarketing company, to make a magazine cover. 
Using high density arrays of electroencephalographic (EEG) sensors to capture test subjects' brainwave activity, NeuroFocus measured and analyzed their responses to three different cover designs for the August 7 edition of New Scientist.

The International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ISAPS) has produced the ISAPS Biennial Global Survey(TM) of plastic surgeons and procedures in the top 25 countries and regions - representing 75% of all procedures in 2009.  They say this ISAPS Survey marks the first time reliable international plastic surgery data has been obtained and analyzed by independent statistical specialists. 
Geographic Trends
The ISAPS Global Survey revealed a new hierarchy of countries with the most surgical and non surgical cosmetic procedures. While the United States continues its dominance in the field, countries not always associated with plastic surgery are emerging as major centers.

Barchester Green Investment Limited (Barchester),  which bills itself as the UK's leading ethical and environmental financial adviser, released their list of the current 'Heroes and Villains' amongst the ethical and environmental funds. 

Researchers at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology say they have unraveled the mystery of why human embryonic stem (ES) cells and induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells undergo apoptosis (programmed cell death) when cultured in isolation, a discovery that promises new hope to sufferers of debilitating degenerative diseases.

"All Americans look alike" is a common joke in Asia and a similar sentiment is expressed in virtually every other country populated by a race different than its tourists.   And to some degree it is true.  Most people find it much harder to recognize faces of people from different races than their own.During a 15-month research project funded by the  Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), Teesside University academic Dr. Kazuyo Nakabayashi will carry out experiments in Japan and the UK and collate behavioral and eye movement data.The study will involve asking students from different races to look at Oriental and Caucasian faces in photographs and online and will examine the ‘recognition keys’ they use – their eye movement, for example.

Thimios Mitsiadis, Professor for Oral Biology at the University of Zurich, says he has shown that  during tooth formation (odontogenesis) if the Jagged2 gene is inactivated, and thus the Notch signaling pathway is interrupted, tooth crowns will be malformed and enamel will be lacking.Signaling pathways cells react to signals from their environment and one of the most important signaling pathways is the Notch signaling pathway. It is evolutionary conserved to a very high degree and it is involved in the development of all organs and tissues in animal and human embryos.

One way to understand how life similar to that on Earth could exist on other planets is to travel to one of the coldest places on Earth and find the planet's coolest creatures.Professor Liane Benning from the University of Leeds and Dr. Dominique Tobler from the University of Glasgow are traveling to Ny-Ålesund on the island of Svalbard to investigate how the snow and ice there was first colonized by extremophiles, which frequently refers to prokaryotes but are any organisms that thrive in harsh conditions.