News Articles

A new method for fighting skin wrinkles has been developed at the Hebrew University Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Environmental Quality Sciences.
In her doctoral research at the university, Dr. Orit Bossi succeeded in isolating a plant-based antioxidant that delays the aging process by countering the breakdown of collagen fibers in the skin. Dr. Bossi conducted her research under the supervision of Zecharia Madar, the Karl Bach Professor of Agricultural Biochemistry at the Hebrew University, and Prof. Shlomo Grossman of Bar-Ilan University.
Antioxidants operate against free radicals which cause a breakdown of many tissues in the body, including the skin. When found in small quantities in the body, free radicals are not harmful and are even involved in various physical processes.

Large continental ice sheets did not exist in both hemispheres around 41 million years ago during the warmer-than modern conditions of the time.
This is the finding of scientists from the University of Southampton's School of Ocean and Earth Science at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton (NOCS), reported in Nature.
The Eocene epoch (55 to 34 million years ago) was the last interval of sustained global warmth in Earth's history, a likely consequence of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels much higher than today. It has been known for some time that, at the end of the Eocene, ice sheets on Antarctica first expanded to close their modern size.

Expect to see a lot of headlines like "Get drunk, stay cancer free" from science sites that shoot for headlines rather than fact after a university study showed a compound in red wine may help reduce the risk of developing prostate cancer.. The plain truth is the anti-oxidant compound in red wine, resveratrol, is also found in grapes, raspberries, peanuts and blueberries.
You can still get drunk, but it isn't necessary.
Male mice in the study were fed resveratrol and showed an 87 percent reduction in their risk of developing prostate tumors that contained the worst kind of cancer-staging diagnosis. The mice that proved to have the highest cancer-protection effect earned it after seven months of consuming resveratrol in a powdered formula mixed with their food.

One year ago ESA's SMART-1 landed on the moon.
For researchers, the moon is a geophysical laboratory where impacts, volcanism, tectonics and effects of space weather can be studied to put together the story of the Moon’s past. The geochemistry and thus the origins of the Moon, the evolution of the Earth-Moon system and the bombardment of the inner solar system are topics addressed under lunar formation and evolution.
Experts from the SMART-1 team are now working on data calibration, analysis, archival and distribution for the scientific community and are supporting collaborations with upcoming lunar missions.

Previous studies have shown that there is a very weak correlation between experts’ judgments of cultural entertainment, such as movies, and popular judgment. These findings have been taken to mean that ordinary people don’t have “good taste.”
However, a new study by researchers at Columbia University and Boccini University, Italy, argues that when controlling for marketing campaigns, regular consumers show more “good taste” than previously thought.
The most common working definition of “good taste” utilizes the judgment of experts, who have honed their understanding of a particular cultural field through a long period of training.

Starting to diet seems to double the odds a teenage girl will begin smoking, a University of Florida study has found.
UF researchers, who analyzed the dieting and smoking practices of 8,000 adolescents, did not find the same link in boys, who were also less likely than girls to diet, according to findings released Friday in the American Journal of Health Promotion.
“Dieting was a significant predictor of initiation of regular smoking among females,” said Mildred Maldonado-Molina, Ph.D., a UF assistant professor of epidemiology and health policy research and lead author of the study. “We were expecting that this relationship was going to be stronger among females. That has been well-documented, especially because (nicotine) can suppress your appetite.

A new article published in the August issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that infants fine-tune their visual and auditory systems to stimuli during the first year of life, essentially “weeding out” unnecessary discriminatory abilities.
Lisa Scott, a psychologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and her colleagues examined several studies suggesting that infants begin to hone their perceptual discrimination to environmentally relevant distinctions by 9-12 months of age. At the same time, the discrimination of environmentally irrelevant, or less frequently encountered, distinctions declines.

Did male deer evolve less durable teeth because they expect to die young or do they die sooner because their teeth wear out?
Natural selection favors reproduction rather than survival; the cost of reproduction compromises survival. Males of species subjected to intense male-male competition for access to females are known to have shorter life expectancies than females. Earlier aging in males might be related to higher reproductive costs, especially when lifetime reproductive success in males takes place within the few years when they can win contests and maintain their dominance.

Research by the University at Albany shows that information conveyed by a kiss can have profound consequences for romantic relationships, and can even be a major factor in ending one.
In a recently published article, Susan M. Hughes, Marissa A. Harrison, and Gordon G. Gallup, Jr. reveal that many college students have found themselves attracted to someone, only to discover after they kissed them for the first time that they were no longer interested.
"In other words," said Gallup, an evolutionary psychologist, "While many forces lead two people to connect romantically, the kiss, particularly the first kiss, can be a deal breaker."

How does the Great Barrier Reef work, and coral worldwide? Why do they bleach and die and how will they respond to climate change?
Scientists at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, James Cook University and the University of Queensland have compiled the world’s first detailed gene expression library for Symbiodinium, the microscopic algae that feed the corals – and so provide the primary energy source for the entire Reef.
“Symbiodinium uses sunlight to convert CO2 into carbohydrates for the corals to feed on. At the same time there’s evidence the corals control its output, suggesting that they are farming their captive plants” Professor David Yellowlees explains.

The Spallation Neutron Source, the Department of Energy's $1.4 billion research facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has established a new record as the world's most powerful accelerator based source of neutrons for scientific research.
The SNS surpassed the previous record for beam power 160 kilowatts, held by the United Kingdom's ISIS facility, while operating at 183 kilowatts. As the SNS ramps up toward an eventual 1.4 megawatts of power, the beams will produce up to 10 times more neutrons than any existing pulsed neutron source.
A trio of Tennessee lawmakers -- Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Maryville), Rep. Bart Gordon (D-Murfreesboro) and Rep.

How much more would you pay to be near people like you? What about education?
Using restricted-access Census data, a new study examines a quarter-million households on a block-by-block basis to yield new results about the correlation between household attributes and school quality. The researchers find that, conditional on income, households prefer to self-segregate on the basis of both race and education.
“Economists have long been interested in estimating household preferences for school and neighborhood attributes, given their relevance to many central issues in applied economics,” write Patrick Bayer (Duke University and NBER), Fernando Ferreira (University of Pennsylvania), and Robert McMillan (University of Toronto and NBER) in the Journal of Political Economy.