News Articles

We hear lots of concern about global warming and the world's rainforests, though they have even begun to thrive under warming conditions - but what about ancient rainforests, long before the Dawn of Man and the destruction we apparently set into motion just by evolving?
The answer lies in underground coalmines in Illinois.
There lay the remains of the first tropical rainforests to evolve on our planet around 300 million years - when the USA lay on the equator. An amazing feature of the forests is that they are preserved over a vast area. One example covers 10,000 hectares - the size of a city.

Our brains contain their own navigation system much like satellite navigation ("sat-nav"), with in-built maps, grids and compasses, neuroscientist Dr Hugo Spiers told the BA Festival of Science at the University of Liverpool today. The brain's navigation mechanism resides in an area know as the hippocampus, which is responsible for learning and memory and famously shown to be different in London taxi drivers in a Wellcome Trust-funded study carried out by Professor Eleanor Maguire at UCL (University College London).
That's right, cabbies have better brains for GPS. The study showed that a region of the hippocampus was enlarged in London taxi drivers compared to the general population. Even bus drivers do not have the same enlarged area, and general skill at navigating is not related to hippocampus size, suggesting that the difference is linked to 'The Knowledge' of the city's 250,000 streets built up by taxi drivers over many years.

Prof. Leonid Yaroslavsky from Tel Aviv University believes that humans may have an ability to "see" colors and shapes - with their skin.
He outlines his 'optic-less imaging model' in a chapter of a new book, "Advances in Information Optics and Photonics", and even says it could lead to a new form of optical imaging technology that beats the limitations of today's lens-based imaging devices. This model, he says, may also explain how a controversial primordial instinct might have evolved over millions of years.

Mayo Clinic investigators have demonstrated that stem cells can be used to regenerate heart tissue to treat dilated cardiomyopathy, a congenital defect, according to research published in Stem Cells.
The study expands on the use of embryonic stem cells to regenerate tissue and repair damage after heart attacks and demonstrates that stem cells also can repair the inherited causes of heart failure.
The team reproduced prominent features of human malignant heart failure in a series of genetically altered mice. Specifically, the "knockout" of a critical heart-protective protein known as the KATP channel compromised heart contractions and caused ventricular dilation or heart enlargement.

Natarajan found that ultra-massive black holes, which lurk in the centers of huge galaxy clusters like the one above, seem to have an upper mass limit of 10 billion times that of the Sun. (Credit: NASA)

There appears to be an upper limit to how big the universe’s most massive black holes can get, according to new research led by Yale University astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan and Ezequiel Treister, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Hawaii.

The University of Southampton is launching the world's largest-ever study of near-death experiences this week.
The AWARE (AWAreness during REsuscitation) study is to be launched by the Human Consciousness Project of the University of Southampton - an international collaboration of scientists and physicians who have joined forces to study the human brain, consciousness and clinical death.
The study is led by Dr Sam Parnia, an expert in the field of consciousness during clinical death, together with Dr Peter Fenwick and Professors Stephen Holgate and Robert Peveler of the University of Southampton. Following a successful 18-month pilot phase at selected hospitals in the UK, the study is now being expanded to include other centres within the UK, mainland Europe and North America.

Yeast, the essential microorganism for fermentation in the brewing of beer, converts carbohydrates into alcohol and other products that influence appearance, aroma, and taste. In a study published online today in Genome Research, researchers have identified the genomic origins of the lager yeast Saccharomyces pastorianus, which could help brewers to better control the brewing process.
For thousands of years, ale-type beers have been brewed with Saccharomyces cerevisiae (brewer's or baker's yeast). In contrast, lager beer, which utilizes fermentations carried out at much lower temperature than for ale, is a more recently developed alcoholic beverage, appearing in Bavaria near the end of the Middle Ages.

Arthroscopic surgery is widely accepted as an effective treatment for osteoarthritis of the knee. It's a minimally invasive surgical procedure involving insertion of an arthroscope and other instruments into the joint through small incisions in order to remove cartilage fragments and smooth the joint surfaces. Osteoarthritis is the most common form of arthritis affecting one in ten Canadians and 27 million Americans.
A landmark study conducted in London, Canada at The University of Western Ontario and Lawson Health Research Institute shows that a routinely practiced knee surgery is ineffective at reducing joint pain or improving joint function for sufferers of osteoarthritis. The study appears in the September 11th New England Journal of Medicine.

It sounds like common sense to say the level of nutrients in soil determines how many different kinds of plants and trees can thrive in an ecosystem, but it's only now that mathematicians have modelled all the different possible relationships between nutrients and biodiversity in lab-based experimental ecosystems.
Writing in Nature, they found that although nutrient availability definitely has an impact on biodiversity, the precise relationship between the two depends on which species are present in the ecosystem. This means that in some cases low levels of nutrients can lead to high levels of biodiversity.

Contrary to the national "carbon budgets" as outlined in the Kyoto Protocol, a new analysis in Nature suggests that old growth forests are "carbon sinks" and they continue to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and mitigate climate change for centuries.
Old growth forests around the world are not protected by international treaties and have been considered of no significance in the Kyoto Protocol. That perspective was largely based on findings of a single study from the late 1960s and these scientists now say it needs to be changed.
An analysis of 519 different plot studies found that about 15 percent of the forest land in the Northern Hemisphere is unmanaged primary forests with large amounts of old growth, and that rather than being irrelevant to the Earth's carbon budget, they may account for as much as 10 percent of the global net uptake of carbon dioxide.

What do you call a supernova that is not as powerful and doesn't destroy the star?
A babynova? Subnova?
We'll need to think of something, according to Berkeley astronomer Nathan Smith, because that is what happened in 1843 to Eta Carinae, the galaxy's second most studied star.
Eta Carinae (η Car) is a massive, hot, variable star visible only from the Southern Hemisphere, and is located about 7,500 light years from Earth in a young region of star birth called the Carina Nebula. It was observed to brighten immensely in 1843, and astronomers now see the resulting cloud of gas and dust, known as the Homunculus nebula, wafting away from the star. A faint shell of debris from an earlier explosion is also visible, probably dating from around 1,000 years ago.

The first beam in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN was successfully steered around the full 27 kilometres of the world’s most powerful particle accelerator at 10h28 this morning. This historic event marks a key moment in the transition from over two decades of preparation to a new era of scientific discovery.
“It’s a fantastic moment,” said LHC project leader Lyn Evans, “we can now look forward to a new era of understanding about the origins and evolution of the universe.”
Starting up a major new particle accelerator takes much more than flipping a switch. Thousands of individual elements have to work in harmony, timings have to be synchronized to under a billionth of a second, and beams finer than a human hair have to be brought into head-on collision.