News Articles

Every advance in memory storage devices presents a new marvel of just how much memory can be squeezed into very small spaces. Considering the potential of nanolasers being developed in Sakhrat Khizroev’s lab at the University of California, Riverside, things are about to get a lot smaller.
As reported in the latest issue of Technology Review, Khizroev is leading a team exploring lasers so tiny that they point to a future where a 10-terabit hard drive is only one-inch square.

A new study published in this week’s Christmas issue of the BMJ says that humor appears to develop from aggression caused by male hormones.
Does it mean men are funnier? Or that more aggressive people are funnier? It means men, especially aggressive men, think they are funnier, according to Professor Sam Shuster.

Planetary scientists have puzzled for years over an apparent contradiction on Mars. Abundant evidence points to an early warm, wet climate on the red planet, but there’s no sign of the widespread carbonate rocks, such as limestone, that should have formed in such a climate.
Now, a detailed analysis in the Dec. 21 issue of Science by MIT’s Maria T. Zuber and Itay Halevy and Daniel P. Schrag of Harvard University provides a possible answer to the mystery. In addition to being warmed by a greenhouse effect caused by carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, as on Earth, the early Mars may have had the greenhouse gas sulfur dioxide in its atmosphere. That would have interfered with the formation of carbonates, explaining their absence today.

With powerful instruments scouring the heavens, astronomers have found more than 240 planets in the past two decades, none likely to support Earth-like life, but as astronomers become more adept at finding planets orbiting other stars it’s natural to wonder if anybody is looking back. A team of astronomers has speculated at just what those alien eyes might see using technologies similar to those available to Earth’s astronomers.
“They would only be able to see Earth as a single pixel, rather than resolving it to take a picture,” said Eric Ford, a UF assistant professor of astronomy and one of five authors of the paper.

In normal plants, when sugars (made from water and carbon dioxide during photosynthesis) accumulate in the leaves, photosynthesis slows down, and the plant does not take in as much carbon dioxide from the air. Likewise, when the sugars move out of the leaves, the rate of photosynthesis and carbon intake increases.
How do many plants ship sugars from their leaves to flowers, roots, fruits and other parts of their structure? Using genetic engineering techniques, Cornell researchers have finally proven a long-standing theory of how this occurs.
The findings not only deepen understanding of basic plant biology but could one day allow researchers to genetically engineer plants with increased photosynthetic rates, yields and carbon dioxide intake.

Record-breaking amounts of ice-free water have deprived the Arctic of more of its natural "sunscreen" than ever in recent summers. The effect is so pronounced that sea surface temperatures rose to 5 C above average in one place this year, a high never before observed, says the oceanographer who has compiled the first-ever look at average sea surface temperatures for the region.
Such superwarming of surface waters can affect how thick ice grows back in the winter, as well as its ability to withstand melting the next summer, according to Michael Steele, an oceanographer with the University of Washington's Applied Physics Laboratory. Indeed, since September, the end of summer in the Arctic, winter freeze-up in some areas is two months later than usual.

Hydrogen is the fuel of the future. Unfortunately, one problem remains: Hydrogen is a gas and cannot easily be pumped into a tank like gasoline. Storage in the form of solid hydrides, chemical compounds of hydrogen and a metal or semimetal, are good storage materials in principle, but have not been well suited to automotive applications.
An American research team at the Ford Motor Company in Dearborn and the University of California, Los Angeles, has now developed a novel hydride that could be a useful starting point for the development of future automotive hydrogen-storage materials.

Should we drink at least eight glasses of water a day?
Does shaving hair cause it to grow back faster or coarser?
Does reading in dim light ruin your eyesight?
What percentage of our brains do we use?
Do fingernails grow after death?
These and other common medical beliefs were tackled in this week’s Christmas issue of the BMJ.
Researchers in the United States selected seven medical beliefs, espoused by both physicians and members of the general public, for critical review. They then searched for evidence to support or refute each of these claims. The quality of evidence was taken into account and instances in which no evidence supported the claim were noted.

Using ESO's Very Large Telescope, an international team of astronomers [1] has discovered a stunning rare case of a triple merger of galaxies. This system, which astronomers have dubbed 'The Bird' - albeit it also bears resemblance with a cosmic Tinker Bell - is composed of two massive spiral galaxies and a third irregular galaxy.
The galaxy ESO 593-IG 008, or IRAS 19115-2124, was previously merely known as an interacting pair of galaxies at a distance of 650 million light-years.

Not all individuals who have epilepsy respond to traditional treatments and these individuals are said to have medically refractory epilepsy.
Strict use of a ketogenic diet high in fats and extremely low in carbohydrates is sometimes used for treatment of refractory epilepsy, and is effective about half of the time. However, the mechanisms whereby ketogenic diets suppress epileptic symptoms have long been a mystery.
New data generated by Kelvin Yamada and colleagues at the Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, has revealed that intranasal delivery of leptin, a hormone important in feeding and energy metabolism, delayed the onset of convulsions in a rodent model of seizures.

New research at York has revealed so-called ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ bacteria, suggesting a novel way to control insect pests without using insecticides.
Researchers at the University of York studied the relationship between plant-dwelling insects and the bacteria that live in them – and discovered an unexpected interaction.
Plants are not ‘easy meat’ for insects. In fact, many insects thrive on plant food only because of the presence of a third party: symbiotic bacteria that live in the insects and provide extra nutrients.

Methane, a potent greenhouse gas, is emitted in great quantities as bubbles from seeps on the ocean floor near Santa Barbara. About half of these bubbles dissolve into the ocean, but the fate of this dissolved methane remains uncertain. Researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara have discovered that only one percent of this dissolved methane escapes into the air -- good news for the Earth's atmosphere.
Coal Oil Point (COP), one of the world's largest and best studied seep regions, is located along the northern margin of the Santa Barbara Channel. Thousands of seep fields exist in the ocean bottom around the world, according to David Valentine, associate professor of Earth Science at UC Santa Barbara.