News Articles

You've heard legends of snakes that hypnote their prey - Kaa in "The Jungle Book" did it and Disney is renowned for their scientific accuracy - but a tentacled snake from South East Asia has gone hypnosis one better; it startles its prey so that the fish turn toward the snake's head to flee instead of turning away. In addition, the fish's reaction is so predictable that the snake actually aims its strike at the position where the fish's head will be instead of tracking its actual movement.

Scientists have discovered the presence of a natural deep earth 'pump' that is a crucial element in the formation of ore deposits and earthquakes.  The process, called 'creep cavitation', involves fluid being pumped through pores in deformed rock in mid-crustal sheer zones, which are approximately 15 km below the Earth's surface.The fluid transfer through the middle crust also plays a key role in tectonic plate movement and mantle degassing.The discovery was made by examining one millimeter sized cubes of exposed rock in Alice Springs, which was deformed around 320 million years ago during a period of natural mountain formation.

Girls are gathering online to remake action-oriented Japanese animation videos geared toward males - you know, because males are genetically engineered to like action cartoons with bounty hunter vampires who need to kill their half-brothers that run an evil clan - into romances, because girls are genetically engineered to like ... well, you get the point.   Anime is a style of animation popularized in Japan, usually in material that contains action-filled plots with fantastic or futuristic themes. The style is used in manga, computer games and videos.

Organ donation would be a lot less variable if they could be grown in the lab and a more effective way to build plastic scaffolds on which new tissues and even whole organs might be grown in the laboratory is being developed by an international collaboration between teams in Portugal and the UK.The researchers say rapid prototyping, or three-dimensional(3-D) 'printing', could enable tissue engineering that replicates the porous and hierarchical structures of natural tissues at an unprecedented level.

A University of Colorado at Boulder research team say their discovery of shorelines on Mars is an indication of a deep, ancient lake there and a finding with implications for the discovery of past life on the Red Planet.Estimated to be more than 3 billion years old, the lake appears to have covered as much as 80 square miles and was up to 1,500 feet deep, roughly the equivalent of Lake Champlain bordering the United States and Canada, said CU-Boulder Research Associate Gaetano Di Achille, who led the study. The shoreline evidence, found along a broad delta, included a series of alternating ridges and troughs thought to be surviving remnants of beach deposits.

Scientists who discovered a beaked, plant-eating dinosaur in China called Limusaurus inextricabilis ("mire lizard who could not escape") say it demonstrates that theropod, or bird-footed, dinosaurs were more ecologically diverse in the Jurassic period than previously thought.  Even more, they write in Nature that it offers important evidence about how the three-fingered hand of birds evolved from the hand of dinosaurs.

Some mammoths remained part of British wildlife long after they were believed (scientifically) to have become extinct, according to research published today in the Geological Journal.Analysis of both the bones and the surrounding environment in Shropshire, England provide the most geologically recent evidence of woolly mammoths in western Europe, they say.

When a steep decline in the wool trade prompted an 18th century credit crunch, folks in Yorkshire took up a new (and dangerous) business venture - counterfeiting.In the 18th century, coining was a treasonable offense and therefore punishable by death but in the 1760s and 1770s, a decline in the textile trade motivated hundreds of Yorkshire people from rural communities to risk the gallows by counterfeiting British and Spanish coins. 

Living in an area with more fast food outlets and convenience stores than supermarkets and grocers has been associated with obesity in a Canadian study published by BMC Public Health.Correlation/causation misfire?   Sure, unless you want to believe that the government should put up a fresh food stand within a half mile of your house to keep you from becoming obese. 

The clothing industry discovered decades ago that a mix of natural and synthetic fibers, like taking cotton and adding polyester, can make clothing that's soft, breathable and wrinkle free.Now researchers at the University of Washington are using the same principle for biomedical applications. Mixing chitosan, found in the shells of crabs and shrimp, with an industrial polyester creates a promising new material for the tiny tubes that support repair of a severed nerve, and could serve other medical uses. The hybrid fiber combines the biologically favorable qualities of the natural material with the mechanical strength of the synthetic polymer.

If we're lucky, fossils can at least tell us whether an extinct species was carnivore or vegetarian but the skull characteristics of a new species of parrot-beaked dinosaur and its associated gizzard stones indicate that the animal fed on nuts and/or seeds;the first solid evidence of nut-eating in any dinosaur.Paleontologists discovered the new dinosaur, which they've named Psittacosaurus gobiensis, in the Gobi Desert of Inner Mongolia in 2001, and spent years preparing and studying the specimen. The dinosaur is approximately 110 million years old, dating to the mid-Cretaceous Period.

Stress and strain research got a boost thanks to research from NIST, where scientists have recently found evidence of an important similarity between the behavior of polycrystalline materials, like metals and ceramics, and glasses.Most metals and ceramics used in manufacturing are polycrystals. The steel in a bridge girder is formed from innumerable tiny metal crystals that grew together in a patchwork as the molten steel cooled and solidified. Each crystal, or “grain,” is highly ordered on the inside, but in the thin boundaries it shares with the grains around it, the molecules are quite disorderly.