News Articles

Attractive women face discrimination when it comes to landing certain kinds of jobs, especially those with job titles like manager of research and development, director of finance, mechanical engineer and construction supervisor where appearance is considered unimportant, says a new study.   The discrimination was done by both men and women.But attractive men were not discriminated against, even by women.  It is called the "beauty is beastly" effect, where attractiveness is a hindrance.   

That title reads like a headline from The Onion, right?   Researchers have noted that while media is often blamed for violence and poor grades in kids, it can also do some good.  Researchers at Mahidol University in Bangkok found the type and amount of vegetables children ate improved after they took part in a program using multimedia and role models to promote healthy food, according to their paper in Nutrition&Dietetics Twenty six kindergarten children aged four to five participated in the eight week study. The researchers recorded the kinds and amounts of fruit and vegetables eaten by the children before and after the program.

A group of researchers mimicked the surface of the Moon in their basement and concluded that it was always inherently dry.They used an ion beam accelerator underground at Los Alamos National Laboratory to simulate solar winds on the surface of the Moon and their table-top simulation was able to help formulate an analysis of chlorine isotopic ratios in lunar rock samples that seem to indicate that the Moon never had water of its own.

The Isaiah Scroll is the oldest-known copy of any book of the Bible and after 12 years of researching the Dead Sea Scrolls,  Robert Cargill, an archaeologist from UCLA, got to visit the underground vault beneath the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem.

In a new Cell study, researchers say they have uncovered a new role for an essential cell protein polynucleotide phosphorylase (PNPASE) in shuttling RNA into the mitochondria, the energy-producing 'power plant' of the cell.The import of nucleus-encoded small RNAs into mitochondria is essential for the replication, transcription and translation of the mitochondrial genome, but the mechanisms that deliver RNA into mitochondria remain poorly understood.

Boston had 8 days of above-90 degree Fahrenheit heat temperatures last month, while New York City had 14, Philadelphia had 17 and Washington, DC had 20.While those numbers are above historical averages (5, 7, 11, and 13 days, respectively) they are beneath consensus projections for the average July by just the middle of this century, assuming nothing is done to reduce pollution of heat-trapping gases.   Under that scenario, Boston can expect an average of 12 July days above 90, New York can expect 16, Philadelphia 21, and Washington, DC 22.

A blob-like creature that lived in the ocean approximately 425 million years ago was revealed in research published today.The scientists developed a detailed 3D model of the only known fossilized specimen in the world of a creature called Drakozoon. The specimen was found by one of the team approximately 6 years ago in the Herefordshire Lagerstätte, one of England's richest deposits of soft-bodied fossils.   Drakozoon lived in the ocean during the Silurian Period, 444 to 416 million years ago, and today's model hints at how it lived. 

Anemia is a common blood disorder characterized by low hemoglobin levels and has long been associated with those suffering from colorectal cancer, but researchers at Tel Aviv University  say that low hemoglobin levels can actually indicate a potential for colon cancer years before it's diagnosed. Graduate student Inbal Goldshtein, who works with Dr. Gabriel Chodick and Dr. Varda Shalev of Tel Aviv University's School of Public Health, says that paying close attention to routine blood test results can be an effective screening system for colon cancer which, when diagnosed early enough, can be treated effectively. More than 50,000 people in the U.S. will die from colon cancer in 2010. Better screening could significantly reduce those numbers, Goldshtein says. 

Variations in the Earth’s atmospheric oxygen levels may be closely linked to the evolution of life, with feedbacks between uni- and multicellular life and oxygen, say scientists from Royal Holloway, University of London and from The Field Museum in Chicago.    Writing in Nature Geoscience, they say over the past 400 million years, the level of oxygen has varied considerably from the 21% value we have today and the amount of charcoal preserved in ancient peat bogs, now coal, gives a measure of how much oxygen there was in the past.

Researchers have reported the creation of pseudo-magnetic fields far stronger than the strongest magnetic fields ever sustained in a laboratory, just by putting the right kind of strain onto a patch of graphene.Graphene is a form of carbon that consists of a single layer of carbon atoms.  A carbon atom has four valence electrons.   In graphene (and in graphite, a stack of graphene layers), three electrons bond in a plane with their neighbors to form a strong hexagonal pattern, like chicken-wire. The fourth electron sticks up out of the plane and is free to hop from one atom to the next. The latter pi-bond electrons act as if they have no mass at all, like photons. They can move at almost one percent of the speed of light.

What if assumptions of bias factored into test results to overcome social or cultural bias that prevents some people from achieving high test scores turned out to be flawed?That's a messy sentence, right?   Confusing sentences like that are what happens when 40 years of accepted practice in using  tools to check tests of "general mental ability" for bias are themselves flawed. If it holds up, this finding from the Indiana University Kelley School of Business challenges basically throws out reliance on those exams to make objective decisions for employment or academic admissions.

A new corticosteroid hormone in the sea lamprey, an eel-like fish and one of the earliest vertebrates dating back 500 million years, may shed light on the evolution of steroid hormones.Principal investigator and lead author David Close of the University of British Columbia's Department of Zoology andcolleagues at Michigan State University identified a corticosteroid hormone called 11-deoxycortisol in the sea lamprey that plays dual roles in balancing ions and regulating stresses, similar to aldosterone and cortisol in humans.