News Articles

We get a spectacular new into the active galaxy Centaurus A - NGC 5128 -  as the jets and lobes emanating from the central black hole have been imaged at submillimeter wavelengths for the first time.Centaurus A is our nearest giant galaxy - about 13 million light-years away in the southern constellation of Centaurus. It is an elliptical galaxy, currently merging with a companion spiral galaxy, resulting in areas of intense star formation and making it one of the most spectacular objects in the sky. Centaurus A hosts a very active and highly luminous central region, caused by the presence of a supermassive black hole (see ESO 04/01), and is the source of strong radio and X-ray emission.

Taking up valuable land and growing edible crops for biofuels poses a dilemma: Is it ethical to produce inefficient renewable energies at the expense of an already malnourished population? David Pimentel and colleagues from Cornell University highlight the problems linked to converting a variety of crops into biofuels. Not only are these renewable energies inefficient, they are also economically and environmentally costly and nowhere near as productive as projected.

Rocks formed only under the extreme heat and friction during earthquakes, called pseudotachylytes, may be more abundant than previously reported, according to new research focused on eight faults found in the Sierra Nevada. The research appears in the February issue of the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America.Geologists have previously debated whether these rocks are rarely produced or not based on an apparent absence in the rock record, most likely brought about by the difficulty in identifying them. Only a small fraction of the energy released in an earthquake is consumed by seismic waves, the formation of pseudotachylytes reveals the importance of the heat generated by the earthquake process. 

How the brain keeps tabs on what happened and when is still a matter of speculation but a computational model developed by scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies now suggests that newborn brain cells—generated by the thousands each day—add a time-related code, which is unique to memories formed around the same time. They didn't set out to explain how the brain stores temporal information but were interested in why adult brains continually spawn new brain cells in the dentate gyrus, the entryway to the hippocampus. The hippocampus, a small seahorse-shaped area of the brain, distributes memory to appropriate storage sections in the brain after readying the information for efficient recall.

Is it possible to share a pain that you observe in another but have never actually experienced yourself?  A new study uses brain-imaging  to try and answer this question and the research,  published in Neuron, may provide insight into the brain mechanisms involved in empathy.Brain-imaging studies have shown similar patterns of brain activity when subjects feel their own emotions or observe the same emotions in others. It has been suggested that a person who has never experienced a specific feeling would have a difficult time directly empathizing with a person through a "mirror matching" mechanism that requires previous experience and would instead have to rely on a higher inferential processes called "perspective taking." 

Triceratops had three horns but it was not just to impress the females, says a research study led by Andrew Farke, curator at the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology, located on the campus of The Webb Schools.    They used them to settle disputes as wel.   Battle scars on the skulls of Triceratops preserve rare evidence of Cretaceous-era combat, they say.

Plants' ability to sprout upward using their own woody tissues has long been considered one of the characteristics separating the land kind from aquatic plants, which rely on water to support them.

A newly developed mathematical model that figures out the best strategy to win the popular board game CLUE© could some day help robot mine sweepers navigate strange surroundings to find hidden explosives.At the simplest level, both activities are governed by the same principles, according to the Duke University scientists who developed the new algorithm. A player, or robot, must move through an unknown space searching for clues. In the case of CLUE©, players move a pawn around the board and enter rooms seeking information about the killer and murder weapon before moving on to the next room seeking more information.

Toxic nuclear waste is stored at sites around the U.S.  and debate surrounds the construction of a large-scale geological storage site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, which critics maintain is costly and dangerous. The storage capacity of Yucca Mountain, which is would open by 2020, is set at 77,000 tons. The amount of nuclear waste generated by the U.S. is expected to exceed this amount by 2010.A new invention could drastically decrease the need for any additional or expanded geological repositories, say physicists at The University of Texas at Austin who have designed a new system that, when fully developed, would use fusion to eliminate most of the transuranic waste produced by nuclear power plants.

If you have a 401K, you've seen what happens when confidence abandons the stock market.   If people didn't trust financial leaders and institutions before, they certainly do not now.   Paola Sapienza (Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University) and Luigi Zingales (Un iversity of Chicago Booth School of Business) have created the Chicago Booth/Kellogg School Financial Trust Index and they have published the first set of results today.   They say their research shows just how deep America's declining trust runs and how strongly it contributes to the country's financial problems.The results do not speak well for confidence that more government programs are the solution.

A new analysis confirms what we already knew - the evolutionary relationships among animals are not simple and the traditional idea that animal evolution has followed a trajectory from simple to complex—from sponge to chordate—had met a dramatic exception in the metazoan tree of life.But the new study suggests that the so-called "lower" metazoans (including Placozoa, corals, and jellyfish) evolved in parallel to "higher" animals (all other metazoans, from flatworms to chordates).  They say that means Placozoans—large amoeba-shaped, multi-cellular animals—have passed over sponges and other organisms as an animal that most closely mirrors the root of this tree of life.

Mr Yohei Sasakawa, WHO Goodwill Ambassador for the Elimination of Leprosy and Japanese Government Goodwill Ambassador for the Human Rights of People Affected by Leprosy, has called for an end to the common use of the word leper.
Speaking at the launch in London of the fourth Global Appeal to End Stigma and Discrimination Against People Affected by Leprosy, held to coincide with World Leprosy Day, he said that the word carries the meaning of a pariah, or social outcast.
Mr Sasakawa said that people affected by leprosy have demanded that the term not be used.