News Articles

Although most scientists believe tuberculosis emerged only several thousand years ago, new research from The University of Texas at Austin reveals the most ancient evidence of the disease has been found in a 500,000-year-old human fossil from Turkey.
The discovery of the new specimen of the human species, Homo erectus, suggests support for the theory that dark-skinned people who migrate northward from low, tropical latitudes produce less vitamin D, which can adversely affect the immune system as well as the skeleton.
John Kappelman, professor of anthropology at The University of Texas at Austin, is part of an international team of researchers from the United States, Turkey and Germany who have published their findings in the Dec.

Until recently, a student solving a calculus problem, a physicist modeling a galaxy or a mathematician studying a complex equation had to use powerful computer programs that cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. But an open-source tool based at the University of Washington won first prize in the scientific software division of Les Trophées du Libre, an international competition for free software.
The tool, called Sage, faced initial skepticism from the mathematics and education communities.
"I've had a surprisingly large number of people tell me that something like Sage couldn't be done – that it just wasn't possible," said William Stein, associate professor of mathematics and lead developer of the tool. "I'm hearing that less now."

Creating a strongly oil-repelling, or “oleophobic” material, has been a long-standing challenge for scientists since there are no natural examples of such a material.
“Nature has developed a lot of methods for waterproofing, but not so much oil-proofing,” said Gareth McKinley, MIT School of Engineering Professor of Teaching Innovation in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and a member of the research team that have designed the first simple process for manufacturing materials that strongly repel oils. “The conventional wisdom was that it couldn't be done on a large scale without very special lithographic processes.”
Yet the MIT team has done it.

Described as a hotspot of botanical diversity, there are more than 20,000 indigenous plant species in South Africa. Several thousand of them are used by traditional healers every day in that country for treating a range of problems from the common cold to serious diseases such as AIDS.
How safe and effective these treatments are will be the focus of The International Center for Indigenous Phytotherapy Studies (TICIPS), a collaborative research effort between the University of Missouri-Columbia and the University of the Western Cape, South Africa.

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.