News Articles

An international team of astronomers led by Ohio State University has examined dark matter in the outer reaches of our galaxy in a new way.
For the first time, they were able to employ triangulation -- a method rooted in ancient Greek geometry -- to estimate the location of dark matter and calculate its mass.

This composite image shows the microlensing event OGLE-2005-SMC-001 as a distant star brightened (left) and dimmed (right) over the summer of 2005, with views taken from two very distant vantage points.

The latest find from an international planet-hunting team of amateur and professional astronomers is one of the oddest extrasolar planets ever cataloged -- a mammoth orb more than 13 times the mass of Jupiter that orbits its star in less than four days.
Researchers from the U.S.-based XO Project unveiled the planet, XO-3b, at today's American Astronomical Society meeting in Honolulu. Christopher Johns-Krull, a Rice University astronomer and presenter of the team's results, said, "This planet is really quite bizarre. It is also particularly appropriate to be announcing this find here, since the core of the XO project is two small telescopes operating here in Hawaii."

Scientists have identified the receptor in cells of the peripheral nervous system that is most responsible for the body's ability to sense cold.
The findings reveal one of the key mechanisms by which the body detects temperature sensation. But in so doing it also illuminates a mechanism that mediates how the body experiences intense stimuli – temperature, in this case – that can cause pain.

Menthol and TRPM8

Animals differ strikingly in character and temperament. Yet only recently has it become evident that personalities are a widespread phenomenon in the animal kingdom. Animals as diverse as spiders, mice and squids appear to have personalities. Personality differences have been described in more than 60 species, including primates, rodents, birds, fish, insects and mollusks.
New work by Max Wolf (University of Groningen; currently at the Santa Fe Institute), Santa Fe Institute Postdoctoral Fellow Sander van Doorn, Franz Weissing (University of Groningen), and Olof Leimar (Stockholm University) offers an explanation for the evolution of animal personalities.

Huge waves that struck Reunion Island and coastlines across Indonesia earlier this month all originated from the same storm that occurred south of Cape Town, South Africa, and were tracked across the entire Indian Ocean for some 10 000 kilometres over a nine-day period by ESA's Envisat satellite.

Picture taken on 14 May 2007 in Saint-Leu, on the French Indian Ocean island of Reunion, of a giant wave breaking on the coast. Credits: AFP

It seems almost certain that San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds will pass Hank Aaron as baseball’s all-time home-run king sometime this summer, but his pursuit has generated little public interest.
There may be several reasons for this, ranging from Bonds’ prickly personality to the suspicion that he may have used performance-enhancing drugs later in his career, say two Duke University professors.
Courtesy Orange County Register

You might think it's something from the movie "Total Recall" but instead researchers are using brain "pacemakers" to regulate diseased signals in the brains of Parkinson's disease patients.
These devices are FDA-approved and in use in 30,000 patients but still not well understood.
Biomedical engineers at Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering have found that stimulation administered by rapid-fire electrical pulses deep in the brain produces what they call an "informational lesion." By relaying a repetitious and therefore meaningless message, constant pulses overwhelm the erratic bursts of brain activity characteristic of disease.
"Periodic bursts in the brains of people with tremor -- which might follow a pattern such as 'pop-pop-pop, silence, pop-pop-pop, silence' -- propa

How well do you know your child's pediatrician? Is he or she board certified in pediatrics, or has he or she ever completed specialty training in the field?
Findings from a new study from the University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children's Hospital's Child Health Evaluation and Research (CHEAR) Unit may prompt parents to find out if their child's physician really is who he claims to be – a board-certified and specialty-trained pediatrician.

The signature of climate change over the past 40 years has been identified in temperatures of the Indian Ocean near Australia.
"From ocean measurements and by analysing climate simulations we can see there are changes in features of the ocean that cannot be explained by natural variability," said CSIRO oceanographer Dr Gael Alory.

Mule deer are giving new meaning to watching out for other mothers' kids. Whitetail deer, not so much.
An intriguing study of mule deer and whitetail deer conducted by the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada and the University of Lethbridge, also in Canada, showed that both species responded to the recorded distress calls of fawns, similar to the responses elicited when coyotes attack fawns, with mule deer mothers responding to both whitetail and mule deer calls, even when their own fawn stood next to them.

Recent discoveries regarding the physics of ceramic superconductors may help improve scientists' understanding of resistance-free electrical power.
Tiny, isolated patches of superconductivity exist within these substances at higher temperatures than previously were known, according to a paper by Princeton scientists, who have developed new techniques to image superconducting behavior at the nanoscale.

Using a customized microscope, Princeton scientists have mapped the strength of current-carrying electron pairs as they form in a ceramic superconductor. From the top left, the images show the same 30-nanometer square region of the ceramic at successively cooler temperatures.

Children are able to solve approximate addition or subtraction problems involving large numbers even before they have been taught arithmetic, according to a study conducted at Harvard University, by researchers from the University of Nottingham and Harvard.
The study suggests that children do not need to master either the logic of place value or the addition table in order to perform approximate addition and subtraction. Children’s difficulty with learning school arithmetic may stem from the need to produce an exact number when solving problems. Elementary education in mathematics might be improved – and children’s interest in the subject enhanced – if children’s talent for approximate calculation could be built upon in the classroom, the authors suggest.