News Articles

Science fiction writers have long envisioned sailing a spacecraft by the optical force of the sun’s light. But, the forces of sunlight are too weak to fill even the oversized sails that have been tried. Now a team led by researchers at the Yale School of Engineering&Applied Science has shown that the force of light indeed can be harnessed to drive machines — when the process is scaled to nano-proportions.  Their work opens the door to a new class of semiconductor devices that are operated by the force of light. They envision a future where this process powers quantum information processing and sensing devices, as well as telecommunications that run at ultra-high speed and consume little power. 

As you gorge on food this Thanksgiving and throughout the holiday season, you might not want to think about the fat content of all the goodies you've indulged in. Nevertheless, your brain will be keeping tabs directly, suggests a report in the issue of Cell. Researchers have discovered in studies of rats that one type of lipid produced in the gut rises after eating fatty foods. Those so called N-acylphosphatidylethanolamines or NAPEs enter the bloodstream and go straight to the brain, where they concentrate in a brain region that controls food intake and energy expenditure. 

With hard bony shells to shelter and protect them, turtles are unique and have long posed a mystery to scientists who wonder how such an elegant body structure came to be. Since the age of dinosaurs, turtles have looked pretty much as they do now with their shells intact, and scientists lacked conclusive evidence to support competing evolutionary theories. Now with the discovery in China of the oldest known turtle fossil, estimated at 220- million-years-old, scientists have a clearer picture of how the turtle got its shell. 

Saturn's moon Enceladus may indeed hide an underground reservoir of water.Scientists at Jet Propulsion Lab in California, the University of Colorado and the University of Central Florida in Orlando teamed up to analyze the plumes of water vapor and ice particles spewing from the moon. They used data collected by the Cassini spacecraft's Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph (UVIS). Cassini was launched from the Kennedy Space Center in 1997 and has been orbiting Saturn since July 2004. The team, including UCF Assistant Professor Joshua Colwell, found that the source of plumes may be vents on the moon that channel water vapor from a warm, probably liquid source to the surface at supersonic speeds.   The team's findings are reported in Nature.

When broadcaster and health campaigner Anne Diamond reviewed some videogames earlier this year, her damnation was so scathing that it overshadowed The Byron Review, a major government-commissioned report on the subject. Fast forward eight months and the leading health campaigner is now working with researchers to test a theory that certain casual games may actually help weight loss and she's recruiting volunteers for a clinical trial to put the theory to the test.
This study was prompted by work already undertaken in the U.S.

Globally every year, obese people waste billions on food products that 'imply' that they aid weight loss, but are totally ineffective, says a nutritional expert on British Medical Journal (www.bmj.com) today. Professor Lean from the University of Glasgow, is hopeful that a new European Union (EU) Directive on Unfair Commercial Practices, adopted this year in UK, will finally protect vulnerable consumers who are tricked into to buying useless food products or supplements in attempts to combat their disease. Unlike medicines, food products that are marketed for health reasons are not subject to the same stringent research trials and control, and consumers are often misled. 

Take out carbon credit politics and misplaced technical concerns, says the World Agroforestry Center , and existing technology that could effectively monitor carbon storage in developing country landscapes could save more carbon than closing 1,400 coal-burning power plants.

No one needs to tell Disney, who brought the likes of Herbie the Love Bug and Lightning McQueen to the big screen, that cars have personalities.   A study co-authored by a Florida State University researcher says it has confirmed through a complex statistical analysis that many people see human facial features in the front end of automobiles and ascribe various personality traits to cars -- a modern experience driven by our prehistoric psyches.Researchers, product designers and, of course, filmmakers have long toyed with the idea that cars have faces, but this study is the first to investigate the phenomenon systematically. The study will be published in the December issue of the journal Human Nature.

Media coverage of clinical trials does not contain the elements readers require to make informed decisions. A comparison of the coverage received by pharmaceutical and herbal remedy trials, reported in BMC Medicine, has revealed that it is rarely possible for the lay public to assess the credibility of the described research.

Bone growth is controlled in the gut through serotonin, the same naturally present chemical used by the brain to influence mood, appetite and sleep, according to a new discovery from researchers at Columbia University Medical Center. Until now, the skeleton was thought to control bone growth, and serotonin was primarily known as a neurotransmitter acting in the brain. This new insight could transform how osteoporosis is treated in the future by giving doctors a way to increase bone mass, not just slow its loss. Findings are reported in the Nov. 26, 2008 issue of Cell.

Enormous cave bears, Ursus spelaeus, that once inhabited a large swathe of Europe, from Spain to the Urals, died out 27,800 years ago, around 13 millennia earlier than was previously believed, scientists have reported.  Despite over 200 years of scientific study – beginning in 1794 when a young anatomist, J. Rosenmüller, first described bones from the Zoolithenhöhle in Bavaria as belonging to a new extinct species, which he called cave bear – the timing and cause of its extinction remain controversial.

Scientists have detected an organic sugar molecule that is directly linked to the origin of life, in a region of our galaxy where habitable planets could exist.  The international team of researchers, including a researcher at University College London (UCL), used the IRAM radio telescope in France to detect the molecule in a massive star forming region of space, some 26000 light years from Earth.