News Articles

It’s a rare case of all light and no heat: A new study reports that a laser can be used to switch a film of vanadium dioxide back and forth between reflective and transparent states without heating or cooling it.
It is one of the first cases that scientists have found where light can directly produce such a physical transition without changing the material’s temperature.
It is also among the most recent examples of “coherent control,” the use of coherent radiation like laser light to affect the behavior of atomic, molecular or electronic systems. The technique has been used to control photosynthesis and is being used in efforts to create quantum computers and other novel electronic and optical devices.

Violence is a frequent occurrence in television shows and movies, but can watching it make you behave differently?
Although research has shown some correlation between exposure to media violence and real-life violent behavior, there has been little direct neuroscientific support for this theory until now.
Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center’s Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) Research Center have shown that watching violent programs can cause parts of your brain that suppress aggressive behaviors to become less active.

(A) Each of the eighty-four clips was rated for violence, fear, and excitement on continuous visual analogue scales (n = 6 subjects).

Are those inclined towards generosity genetically programmed to behave that way? A team of researchers believes this to be true based on their latest study.
Through an online task involving making a choice whether or not to give away money, the researchers found that those who chose to give away some or all of their money differed genetically from those involved in the exercise who chose not to give their money away.
The scientists conducted the experiment with 203 online "players". Each player could choose to keep the equivalent of $12 he was allocated, or to give all or part of it to an anonymous other player.

Scientists exploring one of the largest remaining blocks of tropical forest in Western Africa discovered significant populations of new, rare and threatened species underscoring the area’s high biological diversity and value.
The findings from a 2006 expedition to Ghana’s Atewa Range Forest Reserve (Atewa) led by Conservation International’s Rapid Assessment Program (RAP) are presented in a report made public today.

Climate scientists warned the United Nations Climate Conference in Bali of the need to act immediately to cut greenhouse gas emissions, with a window of only 10-15 years for global emissions to peak and decline, and a goal of at least a 50 per cent reduction by 2050.
They stated that if immediate action is not taken, millions of people will be at risk from extreme events such as heat waves, drought, floods and storms, with coasts and cities threatened by rising sea levels, and many ecosystems, plants and animal species in serious danger of extinction.
The researchers have issued a ‘Bali Climate Declaration by Scientists’ in which they call on government negotiators from the 180 nations represented at the meeting to recognize the urgency of taking action now.

A new species of bacteria discovered living in one of the most extreme environments on Earth could yield a tool in the fight against global warming.
In a paper published in Nature, University of Calgary biology professor Peter Dunfield and colleagues describe the methane-eating microorganism they found in the geothermal field known as Hell’s Gate, near the city of Rotorua in New Zealand.
It is the hardiest “methanotrophic” bacterium yet discovered, which makes it a likely candidate for use in reducing methane gas emissions from landfills, mines, industrial wastes, geothermal power plants and other sources.

It could be a late night infomercial - a magical caffeine cream that slenderizes thighs.
But a new study in the Journal of Cosmetic Dermatology reports just that - Brazilian researchers studied 99 women treated with a cream consisting mostly of a 7 percent caffeine solution. The women used the cream twice daily for 30 days.
When the researchers took their subjects’ measurements at the end of the study, the slimming effect was clear. More than 80 percent of the women had a reduction in the circumference of their upper and lower thighs. Nearly 68 percent also reduced their hip measurements.

Waiters will pick up an inverted glass with their thumb pointing down if they plan to pour water into the glass. Grabbing thumb-down may feel awkward at first but it allows the waiter to be more comfortable when the glass is turned over and water poured inside.
The way human adults grasp objects is typically influenced more by their knowledge of what they intend to do with the objects than the objects' immediate appearance. We perform these tasks, and even tasks like grabbing a pencil, without thinking, but the motor planning necessary to grasp an object is quite complex.
Psychologists call this the “end-state comfort effect,” when we adopt initially unusual, and perhaps uncomfortable, postures to make it easier to actually use an object.

Much of the gaseous mass of the universe is bound up in a tangled web of cosmic filaments that stretch for hundreds of millions of light-years, according to a new supercomputer study by a team led by the University of Colorado at Boulder.
The study indicated a significant portion of the gas is in the filaments -- which connect galaxy clusters -- hidden from direct observation in enormous gas clouds in intergalactic space known as the Warm-Hot Intergalactic Medium, or WHIM, said CU-Boulder Professor Jack Burns of the astrophysical and planetary sciences department.
The team performed one of the largest cosmological supercomputer simulations ever, cramming 2.5 percent of the visible universe inside a computer to model a region more than 1.5 billion light-years across.

A variant of a gene involved in communication among brain cells has a direct influence on alcohol consumption in mice, according to a new study by scientists supported by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the U.S. Army.
Scientists do not know yet whether a similar gene variant, with a similar effect on alcohol consumption, exists in humans.
Known as Grm7, the gene encodes a receptor subtype that inhibits the release of glutamate and other neurotransmitter molecules that brain cells use to communicate with one another. Researchers identified a gene variant, or polymorphism, that reduces the abundance of Grm7 messenger RNA (mRNA) in brain tissue.

A chemical found in household fittings has been found to affect the development of the mammary gland in rats and new research published in BMC Genomics is the first to show that this chemical can also affect the breasts' genomic profile.
Jose Russo and coworkers from the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, along with colleagues from the University of Alabama in Birmingham, US, fed lactating rats with butyl benzyl phthalate (BBP), which their offspring then absorbed via breast milk. The offspring ingested levels of chemical estimated to be nearly equivalent to the Environmental Protection Agency's safe dose limit of BBP for humans.

The age-old refrain, “Eat your vegetables!” gets scientific support as researchers present the latest findings on cancer prevention at the American Association for Cancer Research’s Sixth Annual International Conference on Frontiers in Cancer Prevention, being held December 5 – 8 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Today, researchers present new data that demonstrate how diets full of raw vegetables --particularly broccoli sprouts -- and black raspberries could prevent or slow the growth of some common forms of cancer.