News Articles

There is good news in the annual data report from the United States Renal Data System, coordinating center based at the University of Michigan Kidney Epidemiology and Cost Center, in partnership with Arbor Research Collaborative for Health. 

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- Combining the drug topiramate with psychological counseling curbed marijuana use among young smokers significantly more than did counseling alone, according to newly published results of a small randomized, controlled trial at Brown University. The results come with a caveat, however: many study volunteers couldn't tolerate the medicine's side effects.
There is no FDA-approved medication for treating cannabis dependence and misuse. Meanwhile, the benefits of counseling treatment, such as motivational enhancement therapy (MET), aren't enough to help many patients, said Robert Miranda Jr., associate professor (research) of psychiatry and human behavior in the Alpert Medical School.

A team of authors from MIPT, Kansas State University, and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory have demonstrated that it is possible to fully absorb electromagnetic radiation using an anisotropic crystal. The observations are of fundamental importance for electrodynamics and will provide researchers with an entirely new method of absorbing the energy of electromagnetic waves. The paper has been published in Physical Review B.

For as much time as Americans spend saying it is the greatest country on Earth, a whole lot of people worry about creating safe spaces where free expression is not allowed, or protesting the behavior of people they don't like.

When white light is passed through a prism, the rainbow on the other side reveals a rich palette of colors. Theoretical physicists, who have increasingly migrated toward making up stuff using math, now claim using such numbers that quantum theories of gravity must also have a 'rainbow' of sorts, composed of different versions of spacetime. They further predict that instead of a single, common spacetime, particles of different energies essentially sense slightly modified versions.

No one expects much of the social sciences, so a heavy reliance on undergraduate psychology student surveys to draw conclusions and resulting lack of reproducibility is dismissed, but the National Institutes of Health is nearly half of the federal government's and lack of reproducibility in biology and other life sciences is of greater concern for that reason.
If it can't be replicated, is it science? Sure, but it's a complex explanation for the public educated on the science process.

COLUMBUS, Ohio--Right now, astronomers are viewing a ball of hot gas billions of light years away that is radiating the energy of hundreds of billions of suns. At its heart is an object a little larger than 10 miles across.
And astronomers are not entirely sure what it is.
If, as they suspect, the gas ball is the result of a supernova, then it's the most powerful supernova ever seen.

Pasadena, CA--A team of astronomers, including Carnegie's Benjamin Shappee, Nidia Morrell, and Ian Thompson, has discovered the most-luminous supernova ever observed, called ASAS-SN-15lh. Their findings are published in Science.

Dietary guidelines used to be a relatively easy process. They were considered authoritative, mainstream media dutifully portrayed them as such because they had government backing, and people obeyed.
But since 1980, when people began to obey them, obesity has skyrocketed. With public education being freed from the shackles of corporate journalists, the public had access to information outside hand-picked nutrition scholars chosen for their beliefs.  And skepticism reigns.

Insects exhibit breathing patterns called discontinuous gas-exchange cycles that include periods of little to no release of carbon dioxide to the environment. Researchers who studied the respiratory patterns of 15 species of ground beetles found that these cycles may minimize the risk of infestation of an insect's tracheal system by mites and other pathogens.
The findings may help provide a more comprehensive understanding of why insects have an evolutionary advantage over other animals.

Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) reconstructed the 3D structure of one of the proteins of Plasmodium falciparum, the causative agent of malaria and the antibodies that act as the first line of defense against the parasite. This research, published in Cell Reports, was conducted at the Structural Cellular Biology Unit, led by Prof. Ulf Skoglund. This study provides valuable knowledge for the design of anti-malaria drugs.

Thanks to the Internet, amateur volunteers known as "citizen scientists" can readily donate their time and effort to science--in fields ranging from medicine to zoology to astrophysics. The astrophysics project Space Warps offers a compelling example of why citizen science has become such a popular tool and how valuable it can be.
Late last year, in a pair of research papers, Space Warps announced the discovery of 29 new gravitational lenses. These arced or blobby features, seen in images of deep space, are actually distant galaxies whose light has been bent by the mass of foreground galaxies. Scientists prize these rare, cosmic phenomena because they offer tantalizing glimpses of objects too distant and dim to be otherwise seen.