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Research shows that as more scholarly and research journals are available online, researchers are citing fewer of them - and they are primarily newer papers.
There's no question the Internet gives scientists and researchers instant access to a wealth of academic journals, a very good thing, but the impact hadn't been studied until recently. New research in Science says that scholars are actually citing fewer papers in their work, and the papers they do cite tend to be more recent publications. This trend may be limiting the creation of new ideas and theories.
James Evans is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, who focuses on the nature of scholarly research. During a lecture on the influence of private industry money on research, a student instead asked how the growth of the Internet has shaped science. "I didn't have an immediate answer," Evans said.

Humans have long been trying to make the dream of nanoscopic robots come true. It's getting closer each time nanoscience produces components for molecular-scale machines.
One such device is a rotor; a movable component that rotates around an axis. Trying to observe such rotational motion on the molecular scale is an extremely difficult undertaking but Japanese researchers at the Universities of Osaka and Kyoto have met this challenge. As Akira Harada and his team report in the journal Angewandte Chemie, they were able to get "snapshots" of individual molecular rotors caught in motion.
As the subject of their study the researchers chose a rotaxane. This is a two-part molecular system: A rod-shaped molecule is threaded by a second, ring-shaped molecule like a cuff while a stopper at the end of the rod prevents the ring from coming off. The researchers attached one end of the rod to a glass support. To observe the rotational motions of the cuff around the sleeve, the scientists attached a fluorescing side chain to the cuff as a probe.

Researchers from China, France, Italy, and the United Kingdom, have created a model that shows exactly how, when a baby suckles at a mother's breast, it starts a chain of events that leads to a surge of the "trust" hormone oxytocin in their mother's brain.

Research at the University of Liverpool has found how Saharan dust storms help sustain life over extensive regions of the North Atlantic Ocean.
Working aboard research vessels in the Atlantic, scientists mapped the distribution of nutrients including phosphorous and nitrogen and investigated how organisms such as phytoplankton are sustained in areas with low nutrient levels.
They found that plants are able to grow in these regions because they are able to take advantage of iron minerals in Saharan dust storms. This allows them to use organic or 'recycled' material from dead or decaying plants when nutrients such as phosphorous – an essential component of DNA – in the ocean are low.

Viruses achieve their definition of success when they can thrive without killing their host. Now, biologists Pamela Bjorkman and Zhiru Yang of the California Institute of Technology have uncovered how one such virus, prevalent in humans, evolved over time to hide from the immune system.
The human immune system and the viruses hosted by our bodies are in a continual dance for survival--viruses ever seek new ways to evade detection, and our immune system devises new methods to hunt them down. Human Cytomegalovirus (HCMV), says Bjorkman, Caltech's Delbrück Professor of Biology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator, "is the definition of a successful virus--it thrives but it doesn't affect the host."

A super-resolution X-ray microscope developed by a team of researchers from the Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI) and EPFL in Switzerland combines the high penetration power of x-rays with high spatial resolution, making it possible for the first time to shed light on the detailed interior composition of semiconductor devices and cellular structures.
The new instrument uses a Megapixel Pilatus detector (whose big brother will be detecting collisions from CERN's Large Hadron Collider), which has excited the synchrotron community for its ability to count millions of single x-ray photons over a large area. This key feature makes it possible to record detailed diffraction patterns while the sample is raster-scanned through the focal spot of the beam. In contrast, conventional x-ray (or electron) scanning microscopes measure only the total transmitted intensity.

"Survival of the fittest" is the catch phrase of evolution by natural selection. While natural selection favors the most fit organisms around, evolutionary biologists have long wondered whether this leads to the best possible organisms in the long run.
A team of researchers at The University of Texas at Austin, led by Drs. Matthew Cowperthwaite and Lauren Ancel Meyers, has developed a new theory, which suggests that life may not always be optimal.

A team of researchers from the University of Manchester, the National Institute of Applied Sciences (INSA) in Lyon and the ESRF has revealed how a growing crack interacts with the 3D crystal structure of stainless steel.
By using a new grain mapping technique it was possible to determine the internal 3D structure of the material without destroying the sample. Afterwards, a crack was initiated in the stainless steel, and the scientists were able to study how the crack grew between the grains. This is the first time that such an experiment has used the 3D grain mapping technique, and the first results are published in Science this week.

New research on the midshipman fish, a close relative of the toadfish, indicates that that the ability to make and respond to sound is an ancient part of the vertebrate success story.
After building a nest for his potential partner, he calls to nearby females by contracting his swim bladder, the air-filled sac fish use to maintain buoyancy. The sound he makes is not a song or a whistle, but a hum; more reminiscent of a long-winded foghorn than a ballad. Female midshipman find it very alluring, and they only approach a male's nest if he makes this call.

Researchers at Goldsmiths, University of London have conducted a study that highlights how errors can occur in the eyewitness identification process of the criminal justice system. The study shows that stress and fear reduce the likelihood of successful identification, bringing into question a victim’s ability to identify the perpetrator of a crime.
Visitors to the London Dungeon were asked to describe and identify an actor encountered in the ‘Labyrinth of the Lost’ who stepped out to block their path. Whilst they were in the labyrinth, some participants wore a heart rate monitor to measure the level of their anxiety. The researchers found that participants who had experienced a higher state of anxiety were less likely to report correct descriptions of the actor and were less likely to correctly identify him/her in a line-up than participants who had experienced less anxiety.

Some bacterial cells can swim, morph into new forms and even become dangerously virulent - all without initial involvement of DNA. Yale University researchers writing in Science describe how bacteria accomplish this amazing feat - and in doing so provide a glimpse of what the earliest forms of life on Earth may have looked like.
To initiate many important functions, bacteria sometimes depend entirely upon ancient forms of RNA, once viewed simply as the chemical intermediary between DNA's instruction manual and the creation of proteins, said Ronald Breaker, the Henry Ford II Professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at Yale and senior author of the study.

University of Alberta scientists contend they have the answer to mass extinction of animals and plants 93 million years ago. The answer, research has uncovered, has been found at the bottom of the sea floor where lava fountains erupted, altering the chemistry of the sea and possibly of the atmosphere.
Earth and Atmospheric Science researchers Steven Turgeon and Robert Creaser found specific isotope levels of the element osmium, an indicator of volcanism in seawater, in black shale—rocks containing high amounts of organic matter—drilled off the coast of South America and in the mountains of central Italy.