News Articles

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.

With all the hype surrounding the Large Hadron Collider, it's easy to forget that there are lots of other puzzles in physics still being tackled every day.
The Kondo effect, one of the few examples in physics where many particles collectively behave as one object (a single quantum-mechanical body), has intrigued scientists around the world for decades.
When a single magnetic atom is located inside a metal, the free electrons of the metal 'screen' the atom. That way, a cloud of many electrons around the atom becomes magnetized. Sometimes, if the metal is cooled down to very low temperatures, the atomic spin enters a so-called 'quantum superposition' state. In this state its north-pole points in two opposite directions at the same time. As a result, the entire electron cloud around the spin will also be simultaneously magnetized in two directions.

Have a Facebook account? Laura Buffardi, doctoral student in psychology, and associate professor W. Keith Campbell from the University of Georgia says it may tell them you are a narcissist.
Narcissism is not just attention-seeking or wanting to be liked. Clearly everyone who signs up for a social media site wants to interact with others. It is more severe and characterized by an inability to form healthy, long-term relationships.
The tremendous growth of social networking sites (Facebook now has 100 million users, for example) has led psychologists to explore how personality traits are expressed online. Buffardi and Campbell chose Facebook because it's the most popular networking site among college students and because it has a fixed format that makes it easier for researchers to compare user pages.

Timothy Judge, PhD, and Beth Livingston from the University of Florida say that sexism still exists and it has positive effects on income ... if you're a man. Their study says men who believe in what they call traditional roles for women (whether they believed a woman's place is in the home, whether employing wives leads to more juvenile delinquency, whether a man should be the primary earner and if the woman should take care of the home and family) earn more money than men who don't, though women with more traditional outlooks don't make much(edited) more than women with more egalitarian views.

Is your life worth more than $130,000? In Holland, it isn't. The Council for Public Health and Healthcare (RVZ) recently advised that only those treatments which cost less than €80,000 to keep a patient alive in good health for a year longer should be eligible for reimbursement.
But the use of an explicit 'value' for lifesaving health care is a controversial discussion in the Netherlands, just like it would be anywhere, and that's wrong, according to health economist professor Han Bleichrodt.

Global corporations view climate change as a driver of risk and opportunity but they'd like to know what works, what doesn't work and what the regulations will be before they make strategic investment decisions, according to this year's findings from the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), which includes exclusive data from 1550 of the world's major companies on greenhouse gas emissions and climate change related strategies.
Senior managers are calling for greater visibility on climate change related policy in order to better anticipate the impact of regulation driven carbon markets and carbon prices.
Despite the uncertainty with regard to regulation the majority of global companies are acting to reduce their emissions. 74% are now reporting emissions reduction targets, showing companies are increasingly taking climate change seriously.