News Articles

It's pretty common to have a level of skepticism regarding modern athletes and performance-enhancing drugs.   A few users taint the entire field, especially if it brings some success.   Baseball, football, cycling ... all elite members are under scrutiny.  But the levels of performance-enhancing drugs in those events is nothing, says a new study.   Participants in this big-money 'sport' have a whopping 80% rate of performance-enhancing drug use.What are we talking about?  Poker.The Nova Southeastern University study says poker players are using drugs such as marijuana, cocaine, amphetamines, Valium, and other prescription medications, as well as substances including caffeine, energy drinks and guarana to get an edge over their opponents.

Computing networks of tomorrow will be evolving meshes of different processors, various legacy and newer hardware, and numerous software and operating platforms spanning generations - making it costly, bordering on impossible, to rely solely on human programmers to build and manage so many diverse systems.The ancient Greeks believed that, above the terrestrial sphere, the universe was filled with a mysterious element called ether or aether - the ‘fifth element'.   In 19th century physics, ether was believed to be the substance that filled all of space, basically an undefined thing like 'dark matter' that is necessary or the universe does not make sense.

Researchers have unearthed a new species of horned dinosaur in Mexico with larger horns that any other species – up to 4 feet long.  The finding has given scientists fresh insights into the ancient history of western North America, according to a research team led by paleontologists from the Utah Museum of Natural History at the University of Utah."We know very little about the dinosaurs of Mexico, and this find increases immeasurably our knowledge of the dinosaurs living in Mexico during the Late Cretaceous," said Mark Loewen, a paleontologist with the Utah Museum of Natural History and lead author of the study.

A project under development at the University of Nevada, Reno, called VI Fit can help children who are blind become more physically active and healthy through video games. The human-computer interaction research team in the computer science and engineering department has developed a motion-sensing-based tennis and bowling exergame."Lack of vision forms a significant barrier to participation in physical activity and consequently children with visual impairments have much higher obesity rates and obesity-related illnesses such as diabetes," Eelke Folmer, research team leader and assistant professor in the computer science and engineering department, said.

Researchers writing in Science have found the possible source of a huge carbon dioxide 'burp' that happened some 18,000 years ago and which helped to end the last ice age.The results provide the first concrete evidence that carbon dioxide (CO2) was more efficiently locked away in the deep ocean during the last ice age, turning the deep sea into a more 'stagnant' carbon repository – something scientists have long suspected but lacked data to support.Working on a marine sediment core recovered from the Southern Ocean floor between Antarctica and South Africa, the international team led by Dr Luke Skinner of the University of Cambridge radiocarbon dated shells left behind by tiny marine creatures called foraminifera (forams for short).

Scientists say ancient fossils unearthed in the Sahara desert belong to a new type of pterosaur (giant flying reptile or pterodactyl) that existed about 95 million years ago. According to the findings published PLoS ONE, the researchers consider the newly identified pterosaur to be the earliest example of its kind.The scientists have named the new pterosaur Alanqa saharicafrom the Arabic word 'Al Anqa' meaning Phoenix, a mythological flying creature that dies in a fire and is reborn from the ashes of that fire.Unearthed in three separate pieces, the jaw bone has a total length of 344mm (13.5 inches). Each piece is well preserved, uncrushed, and unlike most other pterosaur fossils, retains its original three dimension shape.

Florida State accounting professor Douglas Stevens says economic decision-makers frequently factor morality into their judgments and behavior, and it's time for economic models to incorporate morality as a result.Stevens and a colleague have published a paper in Accounting, Organizations and Society that incorporates morality into the economic theory of the firm, known as principal-agent theory. 

A new survey conducted by Virginia Commonwealth University shows that Americans are divided over whether to increase offshore oil drilling, and a majority believes the risks outweigh the benefits.51 percent of those surveyed said the environmental risks outweigh the benefits; 35 percent think the benefits outweigh the environmental risks. However, opinion among the general population about increasing offshore oil drilling is currently divided with 45 percent in support of increasing offshore drilling and 44 percent opposed.

In order to get the public more involved in the climate change issue, scientists and activists have to move away from fear-laden imagery of drowning polar bears and flooded cities, according to new research published in Meteorological Applications. The paper explores how new 'visual strategies' can communicate climate change messages against a backdrop of increased climate scepticism.

Researchers from the University of Minnesota's School of Public Health and Masonic Cancer Center say there is a definitive link between the use of indoor tanning devices and increased risk of melanoma.Their new study of 2,268 Minnesotans found that people who use any type of tanning bed for any amount of time are 74 percent more likely to develop melanoma, and; frequent users of indoor tanning beds are 2.5 to 3 times more likely to develop melanoma than those who never use tanning devices. The study defines frequent uses as people who used indoor tanning for 50 plus hours, more than 100 sessions, or for 10-plus years. This increased risk applies similarly to all ages and genders.

A team of paleontologists writing in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology has described a new species of dinosaur based upon an incomplete skeleton found in western New Mexico. The new species, Jeyawati rugoculus, comes from rocks that preserve a swampy forest ecosystem that thrived near the shore of a vast inland sea 91 million years ago.Although the fossil remains were discovered in 1996, it has only now been confirmed that the species is unique. Jeyawati is a member of an assemblage of dinosaurs and other animals unknown as recently as 15 years ago.

Astronomers studying hydrogen gas clouds found in and above the Milky Way Galaxy have discovered that the clouds have preferred locations in and around the galaxy, a fact which has given astronomers a key clue about galaxy evolution. Astronomers studied gas clouds in two distinct regions of the Galaxy. The clouds they studied are between 400 and 15,000 light-years outside the disk-like plane of the Galaxy. The disk contains most of the Galaxy's stars and gas, and is surrounded by a "halo" of gas more distant than the clouds the astronomers studied.