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When atoms form molecules, they share their outer electrons and this creates a negatively charged cloud. The electrons buzz around between the two positively charged nuclei, making it impossible to tell which nucleus they belong to. They are delocalized.
Is this also true for the electrons located closer to the nucleus? And are those electrons spread out too, or do they belong to just one nucleus, i.e. are they localized?
These questions have been hotly debated for the last 50 years, and an international team of scientists says they have an answer - in true quantum theory fashion, they are both right.

MIT engineers have created ultrathin films made of polymers that could be applied to medical devices and other surfaces to control microbe accumulation. The inexpensive, easy-to-produce films could provide a valuable layer of protection for the health care industry by helping to reduce the spread of hospital-acquired infections, which take the lives of 100,000 people and cost the United States an estimated $4.5 billion annually.
The researchers found they could control the extent of bacterial adhesion to surfaces by manipulating the mechanical stiffness of polymer films called polyelectrolyte multilayers. Thus, the films could be designed to prevent accumulation of hazardous bacteria or promote growth of desirable bacteria.
“All other factors being equal, mechanical stiffness of material surfaces increases bacterial adhesion,” said Krystyn Van Vliet, the Thomas Lord Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering.

High-salt diets may not increase the risk of death, contrary to long-held medical beliefs, according to investigators from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University.
They reached their conclusion after examining dietary intake among a nationally representative sample of adults in the U.S. The Einstein researchers actually observed a significantly increased risk of death from cardiovascular disease (CVD) associated with lower sodium diets.
The researchers analyzed data from the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES III), which was conducted by the federal government among a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults. These data were then compared against death records that had been collected by the government through the year 2000. The sample of approximately 8,700 represented American adults who were over 30 years of age at the time of the baseline survey (1988-1994) and were not on a special low-salt diet.

Ferdinand Magellan set out from Spain in 1519 with hopes of claiming the wealth of the Spice Islands, or Moluccas, for the Spanish. Two years later the explorer claimed the first European contact with a Pacific island culture when he landed on Guam – 1,500 miles north of the Spice Islands.
Was he the worst explorer ever? No, says North Carolina State University archaeologist Dr. Scott Fitzpatrick. Magellan’s historic circumnavigation of the globe was beset by unusual weather conditions, like El Niño, which eased his passage across the Pacific Ocean but sent him over a thousand miles off course.
Yes, El Niño, bane or boon to global warming debaters, depending on which side you are on. Screwing us all up then too.

Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Mark Changizi says that actions like catching a football or easily moving through a room full of people requires something more than quickly responding to a situation — it requires our ability to foresee the future.
It takes our brain nearly one-tenth of a second to translate the light that hits our retina into a visual perception of the world around us. While a neural delay of that magnitude may seem minuscule, imagine trying to catch a ball or wade through a store full of people while always perceiving the very recent (one-tenth of a second prior) past. A ball passing within one meter of you and traveling at one meter per second in reality would be roughly six degrees displaced from where you perceive it, and even the slowest forward-moving person can travel at least ten centimeters in a tenth of a second.

Using newly available data on worldwide cancer incidence, researchers at the Moores Cancer Center at University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine have shown a clear association between deficiency in exposure to sunlight, specifically ultraviolet B (UVB), and breast cancer.
UVB exposure triggers photosynthesis of vitamin D3 in the body. This form of vitamin D also is available through diet and supplements.
Approximately 1,150,000 cases and 410,000 deaths from breast cancer occur annually worldwide, including 215,000 new cases and 41,000 deaths in the United States.

Parental concerns in maintaining germ-free homes for their children have led to an ever-increasing demand and the rapid adoption of anti-bacterial soaps and cleaning agents. But the active ingredients of those antiseptic soaps now have come under scrutiny by the EPA and FDA, due to both environmental and human health concerns.
Two closely related antimicrobials, triclosan and triclocarban, are at the center of the debacle. Whereas triclosan (TCS) has long captured the attention of toxicologists due to its structural resemblance to dioxin (the Times Beach and Love Canal poison), triclocarban (TCC) has ski-rocketed in 2004 from an unknown and presumably harmless consumer product additive to one of today’s top ten pharmaceuticals and personal care products most frequently found in the environment and in U.S. drinking water resources.

Hydroxyl is made up of a hydrogen and oxygen atom each. It has been found on another planet for the first time - in the upper reaches of the atmosphere of Venus, some 100 km above the surface - by Venus Express’s Visible and Infrared Thermal Imaging Spectrometer, VIRTIS. It is thought to be important for any planet’s atmosphere because it is highly reactive. On Earth it has a key role in purging pollutants from the atmosphere.
The OH “radical” is a very special and reactive molecule, which is unusual in conventional chemistry because of its reactivity. This detection gives scientists an important new tool to unlock the workings of Venus’s dense atmosphere.
The elusive molecule was detected by turning the spacecraft away from the planet and looking along the faintly visible layer of atmosphere surrounding the planet’s disc. The instrument detected the hydroxyl molecules by measuring the amount of infrared light that they give off.

Physicists at Penn State say they have provided a mechanism by which information can be recovered from black holes; objects from which, according to Einstein's theory of general relativity, not even light can escape. The team's findings pave the way toward ending a decades-long debate sparked by renowned physicist Steven Hawking.
In the 1970s, Hawking stated that black holes evaporate by quantum processes; however, he asserted that information, such as the identity of matter that is gobbled up by black holes, is permanently lost. At the time, Hawking's assertion threatened to turn quantum mechanics--the most successful physical theory posited by humankind--on its head, since a fundamental tenet of the theory is that information cannot be lost.
Hawking's idea was generally accepted by physicists until the late 1990s, when many began to doubt the assertion. Even Hawking himself renounced the idea in 2004. Yet no one, until now, has been able to provide a plausible mechanism for how information might escape from a black hole. A team of physicists led by Abhay Ashtekar, Holder of the Eberly Family Chair in Physics and director of the Penn State Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos, say they have discovered such a mechanism. Broadly, their findings expand space-time beyond its assumed size, thus providing room for information to reappear.

Six Sigma is a business strategy designed to use smarter data and methodology to reduce defects - six standard deviations between the mean and the nearest specification limit. Statistically it is 3.4 defects per million.
Could this business practice be used to help turn companies green by reducing their energy use?
According to mechanical engineer Prabhakar Kaushik of NC College of Engineering in Haryana, India, and colleagues, energy conservation should be at the forefront of company efforts. In a global economy with environmental pressures high on the agenda, organizations are under increasing pressure to control costs, maintain high levels of safety and quality, and save energy. Energy conservation, of course, offers the parallel advantages of helping to reduce costs, improving efficiency, as well as reducing the carbon footprint.

New research appearing in the May issue of Psychological Science suggests that being put in a low-power role may impair a person’s basic cognitive functioning and thus, their ability to get ahead.
Pamela Smith of Radboud University Nijmegen and colleagues Nils B. Jostmann of VU University Amsterdam, Adam Galinsky of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and Wilco W. van Dijk of VU University Amsterdam, focus on a set of cognitive processes called executive functions. Executive functions help people maintain and pursue their goals in difficult, distracting situations. The researchers found that lacking power impaired people’s ability to keep track of ever-changing information, to parse out irrelevant information, and to successfully plan ahead to achieve their goals.

On the 25th anniversary of the first scientific article linking a retrovirus to AIDS, Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, reflects on his experience treating and studying HIV/AIDS for the past quarter century.
Outlining the peaks and valleys of the scientific community’s journey so far, Dr. Fauci writes, “…we must learn from our mis-steps, build on our successes in treatment and prevention, and renew our commitment to developing the truly transforming tools that will one day put this scourge behind us.”
From the outset, AIDS was clearly more menacing than any other novel disease Dr. Fauci and his colleagues had previously encountered, he writes. The period when clinicians lacked the ability to diagnose and treat AIDS was the bleakest of his career. The discovery that HIV causes AIDS stimulated a burst of progress in both the clinic and the laboratory. But the 1987 debut of the first effective drug against HIV, zidovudine (AZT), generated excessive optimism, Dr. Fauci reflects, as the virus quickly and predictably developed drug resistance.