News Articles

Work completed by a visiting research professor at Rowan University, physics professors and a student from the institution shows that light is made of particles and waves, a finding that refutes a common belief held for about 80 years.
Shahriar S. Afshar, the visiting professor who is currently at Boston's Institute for Radiation-Induced Mass Studies (IRIMS), led a team, including Rowan physics professors Drs.

Whip spiders, considered by many to be creepy-crawly, are giving new meaning to the term touchy-feely.
In two species of whip spiders, or amblypygids, mothers caress their young with long feelers, siblings stick together until they reach sexual maturity, and all mix in social groups. This is surprising behavior for these arachnids long-thought to be purely aggressive and anti-social, according to a Cornell researcher.

A mother amblypygid with several of her 7-month-old offspring. Their whips are touching one another.

Plants can do it: they simply grab carbon dioxide out of the air and covert it into biomass. In this process, known as photosynthesis, the plants use light as their energy source. Chemists would also like to be able to use CO2 as a carbon source for their synthetic reactions, but it doesn’t work just like that. A team headed by Markus Antonietti at the Max Planck Institute for Colloids and Interfaces has now taken an important step toward this goal. As described in the journal Angewandte Chemie, they have successfully activated CO 2 for use in a chemical reaction by using a special new type of metal-free catalyst: graphitic carbon nitride.

Employers would be better at keeping workers if they focused on why their employees want to stay rather than what kinds of things make them quit, according to researchers from the University of Washington and Truman State University.
Until recently, most research focused on why people leave jobs rather than why they choose to stay. In a review of the past 15 years of research on employee job satisfaction and voluntary turnover, the researchers examined not only why people quit but what makes workers stay in their current positions.
They found that the decision to quit one's job doesn't necessarily come from job dissatisfaction. Employees may have a plan to leave should something happen in their lives, such as a spouse getting a job in another town.

Probiotic supplements have been used around the world for at least half a century, but almost half (49 percent) of Americans indicate that they have never heard of them, according to a recent survey conducted by Harris Interactive® for Florastor®, the world’s top-selling probiotic, now being launched widely in the United States.
Derived from a Greek term meaning, "for life," probiotics are defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) as "live micro-organisms, which, when administered in proper amounts, confer a health benefit on the host."
Florastor, which utilizes a beneficial, clinically-studied form of a freeze-dried yeast called Saccharomyces boulardii (S.

By mapping the interlocking structures of small molecules and mutated protein "receptors" in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) cells, scientists at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and their colleagues have energized efforts to design molecules that mesh with these receptors, potentially interfering with cancer cell growth and survival.
In a study published in the March issue of Cancer Cell, researchers led by Michael Eck, MD, PhD, of Dana-Farber used X-ray crystallography to determine the structure of two mutated forms of the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) in lung cancer cells. EGFR, a protein known as a tyrosine kinase, plays a key role in relaying growth signals within cells.

It's a modern medicinal miracle. Health food advocates haven't been this excited since Psyllium took the nation by storm. Cocoa is for real and it apparently does everything.
A short while ago, it was said to make us smarter. and before then it could improve blood flow and maybe deter cancer.

Your football coach always told you that the low man wins. Seems that ape-like ancestors may have evolved that way for the same reason.
Australopiths maintained short legs for 2 million years because a squat physique and stance helped the males fight over access to females, a University of Utah study concludes.
"The old argument was that they retained short legs to help them climb trees that still were an important part of their habitat," says David Carrier, a professor of biology. "My argument is that they retained short legs because short legs helped them fight."

This drawing of a male gorilla skeleton illustrates their very short legs.

Human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) hold great promise for benefiting degenerative diseases, and do so by invoking multiple mechanisms. Such cells can be grown in a manner compatible with clinical use (i.e., without animal feeder layers) and even without the need for immunosuppression. These were a few of a number of conclusions arrived at by an international collaboration led by Evan Y. Snyder, M.D., Ph.D., and spearheaded by a member of his lab, Jean-Pyo Lee, Ph.D., of the Burnham Institute for Medical Research ("Burnham"). The study, to be published in Nature Medicine, will be made available by advanced publication at the journal's website on March 11, 2007.

The "raging hormones" of puberty are known to produce mood swings and stress for most teenagers, making it difficult to cope with this period of life. Until now, the specific causes of pubertal anxiety have not been identified, making it harder to understand and treat adolescent angst.
In the current edition of the journal Nature Neuroscience, researchers led by Sheryl S. Smith, PhD, professor of physiology and pharmacology at SUNY Downstate Medical Center, report findings demonstrating that a hormone normally released in response to stress, THP, actually reverses its effect at puberty, when it increases anxiety.
This hormone normally acts like a tranquilizer, acting at sites in the brain that "calm" brain activity.

Each year, malaria results in more than a million deaths. Controlling this disease involves understanding its transmission, and understanding its transmission means understanding its basic reproductive number, R0. For all infectious disease, R0 describes the most important aspects of transmission as it is the expected number of hosts that can trace their infection directly back to a single host after one disease generation. For vector-borne diseases, such as malaria, R0 is given by a classic formula. In a new study published in PLoS Biology, David Smith and colleagues demonstrate that estimates of R0 range from around one to over 3,000, providing much higher estimates than previously thought, with serious implications for the control of the disease.

Understanding the origin and behavior of the magnetic fields of planets and stars is the goal of research being carried out by many teams from all over the world. The VKS1 collaboration (CEA2, CNRS3,4, Ecole normale supérieure in Lyon3, Ecole normale supérieure in Paris4) has succeeded in creating in the laboratory a magnetic field in a highly turbulent flow of liquid sodium. Although the extreme conditions specific to astrophysical and geophysical environments cannot all be reproduced in the laboratory, the magnetic field observed shows remarkable similarities with magnetic fields observed in the cosmos. The findings represent a significant advance in the understanding of the mechanisms at work in the formation of natural magnetic fields.