News Articles

Two terrestrial planets in orbit around a sun-like star, BD +20 307, recently suffered a violent collision, astronomers at University of California Los Angeles, Tennessee State University, and California Institute of Technology will report in a December issue of the Astrophysical Journal, the premier journal of astronomy and astrophysics.
“It’s as if Earth and Venus collided with each other,” said Benjamin Zuckerman, UCLA professor of physics and astronomy and a co-author on the paper. “Astronomers have never seen anything like this before; apparently major, catastrophic, collisions can take place in a fully mature planetary system.”

After several years of detective work, philologists at the University of Stavanger in Norway have collected a unique collection of texts online and they're about to start the most comprehensive analysis of middle English ever.
During the last few years, associate professor Merja Stenroos and post doctor Martti Mäkinen at the University of Stavanger have travelled around Britain and read original handwritten leather manuscripts from the 1300s–1500s.
"It is as natural for us in Stavanger to research Middle English as it is for English researchers. None of us have this language as our mother tongue anyway, says Merja Stenroos, who is managing the project titled MEG - Middle English Grammar.

Whether young people get drunk as a purposeful behavior or as an unintended consequence depends on what country they live in, according to new research on young people in seven countries. The research finds that young people's views on alcohol and drunkenness were influenced more by culture than by factors such as age and sex.
The research, sponsored by the International Center for Alcohol Policies (ICAP), also finds striking similarities about drinking among young people in different parts of the world including:

A nesting behavior study has detailed some previously unconsidered effects of biodiversity loss and climate change - changing seabird biodiversity is resulting in more ammonia in the atmosphere.
Ammonia emissions from seabirds have been shown to be a significant source of nitrogen in remote coastal ecosystems, contributing to nutrient enrichment (eutrophication) and acidification. While most ammonia emissions originate from domesticated animals such as poultry and pigs, seabirds are the most significant emitters of ammonia to the atmosphere in remote regions.

It sounds like an episode of MacGyver. What can you make from a lump of graphite, a piece of Scotch tape and a silicon wafer?
Cornell researchers didn't fly out off a cliff or blow up a door, they created the world's thinnest balloon - a membrane that is just one atom thick but strong enough to contain gases under several atmospheres of pressure without popping.
Unlike your average party balloon or even a thick, sturdy glass container, this membrane is ultra-strong, leak-proof and impermeable to even nimble helium atoms.

In a horror movie of the future, the villain could very well be someone who hijacks your GPS system and sends you to that lonely cabin in the woods.
Global positioning system (GPS) technology is becoming something people can't imagine living without, so if such a ubiquitous system were to come under attack, what could be done?
It's an uncomfortable question, but one that a group of Cornell researchers have considered with their research into "spoofing" GPS receivers.

A team of researchers has identified the active compounds that contribute to the health benefits of pre-germinated brown rice; the healthy components are a related set of sterol-like molecules known as acylated steryl-beta-glucosides (ASGs).
Pre-germinated rice (PR) is an emerging health food whereby brown rice is soaked in warm water prior to cooking; the warm bath induces germination, or sprouting, which stimulates rice enzymes to produce more nutrients. One such nutrient is the important brain chemical GABA (PR is thus often referred to as "GABA rice"), and animal studies have shown that a PR-rich diet can improve cognitive function. Other studies have found that PR can also act as an anti-diabetic.

Have you ever seen a giraffe wait in line? We haven't either. But if you go to an Olive Garden on a Sunday at 5:00 PM and see the line waiting patiently for a Never-Ending Pasta Bowl (and, let's face it, you can't eat more than one anyway) you may wonder if we're really the smartest species.

An international team of earth scientists report movement of warmed sea water through the flat, Pacific Ocean floor off Costa Rica. The movement is greater than that off midocean volcanic ridges. The finding suggests possible marine life in a part of the ocean once considered barren.
With about 71 percent of the Earth's surface being ocean, much remains unknown about what is under the sea, its geology, and the life it supports. A new finding reported by American, Canadian and German earth scientists suggests a rather unremarkable area off the Costa Rican Pacific coast holds clues to better understand sea floor ecosystems.

If your lover's singing is sometimes sexy and sometimes annoying, a change in hormones may be the reason.
A songbird study led by Donna Maney,assistant professor of psychology and a member of the Graduate Program in Neuroscience at Emory University, says it sheds new light on this issue, showing that a change in hormone levels may alter the way we perceive social cues by altering a system of brain nuclei, common to all vertebrates, called the "social behavior network."
Their research examines how genes, hormones and the environment interact to affect the brain, using songbirds as a model and helps provide an understanding of the basic principles underlying brain structure and function common to many species, including humans.

A gamma-ray burst is, in a sense, a look back in time. Scientists have now seen one that happened farther back in time than any other seen before. Even before the existence of the Milky Way.
Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are the most powerful and brightest explosions of energy in our universe. They last only a few milliseconds to several minutes and they outshine all other sources of gamma rays combined. Astronomers now think that most GRBs are associated with the explosive deaths of massive stars. These stars collapse and explode when they run out of nuclear fuel.

Imagine you can never do the simplest memory orientation task, like finding your way home from the grocery store. In a world where most of us take our ability to do 'cognitive mapping' of our environment for granted, being lost all of the time like that can be terrifying.
Writing in Neuropsychologia, a study led by Giuseppe Iaria, a University of British Columbia Faculty of Medicine and Vancouver Coastal Health Authority postdoctoral fellow, used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) together with behavioral studies to assess and characterize the navigational deficiencies of a patient who is completely unable to orient within any environment, getting lost even within the neighborhood where the patient lived for many years.