News Articles

Scientists at Yale School of Medicine have found that two-year-olds with autism looked significantly more at the mouths of others, and less at their eyes, than typically developing toddlers. This abnormality predicts the level of disability, according to study results published in the Archives of General Psychiatry.
Lead author Warren Jones and colleagues Ami Klin and Fred Volkmar used eye-tracking technology to quantify the visual fixations of two-year-olds who watched caregivers approach them and engage in typical mother-child interactions, such as playing games like peek-a-boo.

Get ready for the world's first atomic microscope.
A team of physicists from the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM) and the Madrid Institute of Advanced Studies in Nanoscience (IMDEA-Nanociencia) has created the “quantum stabilized atom mirror”, the smoothest surface ever, according to this week's edition of Advanced Materials magazine.
One of the study's authors, Rodolfo Miranda, professor of condensed matter physics at the UAM and director of the IMDEA-Nanociencia, explained to SINC that the innovation with this almost perfect mirror is the ability to reflect “extraordinarily well” most of the atoms that affect it, through the use of materials of nanometric thickness whose properties are dominated by quantum effects.

There's a sex bias in evolution, according to an article in PLoS Genetics, and it's demonstrated by the fact that women have been more successful on average in passing their genes on to the next generation. "This is because a few males have fathered children with multiple females, which occurs at the expense of other less successful males", says Dr. Michael Hammer, ARL Division of Biotechnology at the University of Arizona.
The group has found DNA evidence that polygyny, the practice among males of siring children with multiple female partners at the same time or successively, has led to an excess of genetic diversity on the X chromosome relative to the autosomes.

Plenty of sun and some ice for water sounds like a lovely place for a moon base, doesn't it?
Three-dimensional views of the mountainous terrain surrounding a “peak of eternal light” near the Moon’s south pole have been released by the European Space Agency. Dr Detlef Koschny will present the images at the European Planetary Science Congress in Münster on Friday 26th September. Images taken by the AMIE camera carried by ESA’s SMART-1 mission have been used to create digital elevation model of the peak, which is almost continuously exposed to sunlight.
“AMIE is not a stereo camera, so producing a 3-D model of the surface has been a challenge,” said Dr Koschny. “We’ve used a technique where we use the brightness of reflected light to determine the slope and, by comparing several images, put together a model that produces a shadow pattern that matches those observed by SMART-1.”

World leaders gathered today at the 2008 Millennium Development Goals Malaria Summit to endorse an ambitious new Global Malaria Action Plan and commit US $3 billion toward reducing the number of malaria deaths to near zero by 2015.

Canadian bedrock more than four billion years old may be the oldest known section of the Earth's early crust, say scientists at the Carnegie Institution. They used geochemical methods to obtain an age of 4.28 billion years for samples of the rock, making it 250 million years more ancient than any previously discovered rocks. The findings offer scientists clues to the earliest stages of our planet's evolution, they say.
"There have been older dates from Western Australia for isolated resistant mineral grains called zircons," says Richard Carlson of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, "but these are the oldest whole rocks found so far."

MIT researchers have designed a new robotic underwater vehicle that can hover in place like a helicopter — an invaluable tool for deepwater oil explorers, marine archaeologists, oceanographers and others.
The new craft, called Odyssey IV, is the latest in a series of small, inexpensive artificially intelligent submarines developed over the last two decades by the MIT Sea Grant College Program’s Autonomous Underwater Vehicles Laboratory. The Odyssey series revolutionized underwater research in the 1990s by introducing the thrifty and highly capable underwater robots. But the previous Odyssey vehicles still had one significant limitation: Like sharks, they could only operate while continuously moving forward.

How well students and schools succeed in mastering a curriculum that includes English Language Arts (ELA), mathematics, and the social and natural sciences, strongly influences how well the students fare in higher education. In California, student mastery in ELA and mathematics is measured with the California Standards Tests (CST).
Apparently, California is not doing very well. UC Riverside's Richard Cardullo examined several years of CST data and his mathematical models predict that nearly all elementary schools in California will fail to meet even the minimum requirements under the "No Child Left Behind Act of 2001" (NCLB) by 2014.

Over a decade after it exploded, one of the nearest supernovae in the last 25 years has been identified. This result was made possible by combining data from the vast online archives from many of the world’s premier telescopes.
The supernova, called SN 1996cr, was first singled out in 2001 by Franz Bauer. Bauer noticed a bright, variable source in the Circinus spiral galaxy, using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. Although the source displayed some exceptional properties Bauer and his Penn State colleagues could not identify its nature confidently at the time.
It was not until years later that Bauer and his team were able to confirm that this object was a supernova. Clues from a spectrum obtained by ESO’s Very Large Telescope led the team to start the real detective work of searching through data from 18 different telescopes, both ground- and space-based, nearly all of which existed. Because this object was found in an interesting nearby galaxy, the public archives of these telescopes contained abundant observations.

Eight-year-old children have a much different learning strategy compared to twelve-year-olds and adults. Eight-year-olds learn primarily from positive feedback ('Well done!'), whereas negative feedback ('Got it wrong this time') scarcely causes any alarm bells to ring. Twelve-year-olds are better able to process negative feedback and learn from their mistakes. Adults do the same, but even more efficiently.

Dogs are often called "man's best friend," and rightly so because they never tell us we are wrong or interrupt us when we talk, are they are always happy to see us when we arrive home.
Some dogs take friendship to a whole other level by pulling us 1,100 miles in a race under the harshest conditions.
Since dogs became domesticated 15,000 years ago, they have worked with and lived next to humans, which may account for the special bond. While each of the 400 breeds and varieties have their fans, only racing sled dogs stand out as the ultra-athlete canine.

Today the new Global Carbon Budget was launched simultaneously by Global Carbon Project co-chair Michael Raupach in France at the Paris Observatory, and in the USA at Capitol Hill, Washington by GCP Executive Director Pep Canadell.
The Global Carbon Project posted the most recent figures for the worlds' carbon budget, a key to understanding the balance of carbon added to the atmosphere, the underpinning of human induced climate change. Despite the increasing international sense of urgency, the growth rate of emissions continued to speed up, bringing the atmospheric CO2 concentration to 383 parts per million (ppm) in 2007.