News Articles

We meet many of the same people every day but without the ability to recognize faces at first glance, our lives would be a confusing mess.    Imagine asking your boss for coffee or a waitress to place a phone call.Monkeys also possess the ability to distinguish between faces of group members and to extract the relevant information about the individual directly from the face. With the help of the so-called 'Thatcher illusion', scientists of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, have examined how people and macaque monkeys recognize faces and process the information in the brain.  They found out that both species perceive the faces of their kin immediately, while the faces of the other species are processed in a different way.

You are all familiar with a solar eclipse, when our Moon passes in front of the Sun and blocks its light, but a similar situation can happen with asteroids, those Sun-orbiting, rocky objects left over from the formation of the Solar System or formed by collisions between other asteroids.We know of about 400,000 asteroids, which range in size from a few hundred kilometers to just a few meters.   Obviously an asteroid is too small to cover the Sun but because of proximity one will occasionally move directly in front of one of the stars in the night sky and block its light from our view, causing a stellar eclipse or 'occultation'.

It's a common phrase; money can't buy happiness.   But a worldwide survey of more than 136,000 people in 132 countries that included questions about happiness and income revealed that life satisfaction certainly does rise with income, though it seems to depend on how you define happiness because positive feelings don't necessarily follow, the researchers report.  It may be a fundamental part of the human condition that few are content, no matter what they have.  The findings, from an analysis of data gathered in the first Gallup World Poll, appear this month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Politicians and education activists believe computer access is creating a generation of "have not" students that will be unable to compete in a digital world.  Their very expensive solution is to guarantee subsidize home computers and even high-speed Internet service.It may not only be incredibly expensive but also a bad idea for the poorest kids, according to a new study by Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy, who say such efforts would actually widen the achievement gap in math and reading scores. Students in grades five through eight, particularly those from disadvantaged families, tend to post lower scores once these technologies arrive in their home.

True or false: The cinema was invented in the late 19th century.It's only true if you consider the cinema to be artificial projection.   It turns out that the original idea behind the cinematic experience, the use of visual and audio means to tell a story, extends back to the Chalcolithic period, commonly called the Copper Age, according to the "Prehistoric Picture Project" being carried out by St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences, the University of Cambridge and the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar..

A survey taken by the Science and Technology Facilities Council says their funded PhD students have high employment rates and above
average salaries.
Since 2007, STFC has funded over 250 new students each year and 200 new students each year prior to that.  The latest study provides a snapshot
of the career paths of these former PhD students and an examination of long-term career outcomes after postgraduate training. The study reveals that 97% of the respondents who gained a PhD with STFC were
in full- or part-time employment and 70% were
still engaged in scientific research in the UK or internationally.  
Of the 27% of respondents who decided to go into
the private sector, the majority went into the business or financial

Proteins are the workhorses of our existence.   These "helmsmen of the cell" are composed of amino acids, whose sequence is already defined by the heritable information in every living being and transport substances, convey messages and carry out vital processes in their role as molecular machines. The translation of this information during the production of proteins (protein synthesis) is determined by the genetic code and 20 amino acids form the standard set of which proteins are built.

A science historian at The University of Manchester says he has cracked 'The Plato Code', secret messages purported to be hidden in the writings of history's most famous philosopher.Plato likely needs no introduction here but, in brief, he was one of the most influential authors in history; philosopher, mathematician and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the West, which laid the foundations of both Western philosophy and science.

Men will sometimes blame hormones for how women act but it isn't just one gender - one thing that sets off hormone changes in men is competition, says a new PNAS study.The average man experiences hormone changes similar to the henpecked bonobo prior to competition, but a more competitive man undergoes changes more like those found in a chimpanzee, say researchers from Duke and Harvard universities.  Chimpanzees live in male-dominated societies where status is paramount and aggression can be severe but in bonobo culture a female is always the most dominant and tolerance can allow for more flexible cooperation and food-sharing.

Researchers at Harvard and MIT using what is called programmable matter have demonstrated how a single thin sheet composed of interconnected triangular sections could transform itself into a boat- or plane-shape, all without the help of people.They envision creating smart cups that could adjust based upon the amount of liquid needed or maybe a Swiss army knife that could change from a wrench to a tripod - obviously readers here envision giant robots that could smite our foes.

Despite some of the more outrageous claims to the contrary, SecondLife, while an abstract 3-D world, is not actually a teaching platform.   It had its moment and devolved rather quickly into another marketing tool for companies but conceptually it provides a good foundation for one.To become one, a tool muct include things a training program with a sequence of activities for students to acquire knowledge as well as a methodology to evaluate previously defined learning results. 

With an increasing trend toward what marketing groups call 'natural' food, some companies have reduced preservatives.  A common preservative, acetic acid, is used to stop bacterial growth in dressings, sauces, cheese and pickles, but new research shows that a reduced amount of acetic acid may be worse than none at all – it increases the amount of toxin from the harmful bacteria in the food.