News Articles

Parents are always worried about their special snowflakes - unless a phone call needs to be  made. Then, parents are no less likely to engage in cell phone and other distracting behavior than the general public, according to a new paper in Academic Pediatrics.

The use of lamps that emit UV radiation in nail salons has raised some concern about the risk of cancer, but previous studies have lacked a large enough sampling of lights from a variety of salons.
To create a more authoritative sample, the authors of a new study tested 17 light units from 16 salons with a wide range of bulbs, wattage and irradiance emitted by each device for their research letter.
Higher-wattage light sources were correlated with higher UV-A irradiance emitted.

University of California, Berkeley, geologist William Dietrich pioneered the application of airborne LIDAR, light detection and ranging, to map mountainous terrain, stripping away the vegetation to see the underlying ground surface - but he still couldn't see what was under the surface: the depth of the soil, the underlying weathered rock and the deep bedrock.
He and geology graduate student Daniella Rempe have now proposed a method to determine these underground details without drilling, potentially providing a more precise way to predict water runoff, the moisture available to plants, landslides and how these will respond to climate change.

Over 60 years of data collected across 8 states by citizen scientists may demonstrate their potential to contribute to monitoring long-term lake water trends over a large area, according to results published April 30, 2014, in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Noah Lottig from University of Wisconsin and colleagues.

A good guitar player tunes their guitar by putting a tuning fork in their mouth and matching the vibrations. They made need it when they are older.
A new paper in Occupational & Environmental Medicine finds that professional musicians are almost four times as likely to develop noise induced hearing loss as the general public, and they are 57% more likely to develop tinnitus - incessant ringing in the ears - as a result of their job.

In light of recent results from the "world's longest experiment", spanning more than 90 years, at the University of Queensland, a group of researchers from Trinity College Dublin explain the background behind their own pitch-drop experiment in this month's Physics World and offer an explanation as to why their research hit the headlines in 2013.

In the United States, murders have plummeted in the last 20 years, as has crime. A culture that in the 1980s was commonly projected to be morphing into gangs of youth wilding across urban areas has become just the opposite. Even New York City is reasonably safe.
But one thing has risen dramatically while crime has dropped; incarceration. 
Now, a group of scholars is saying jail has little to do with crime rate or prevention and they further believe that the negative social consequences (harder to get a job, can't buy a gun, can't vote) and cost of incarceration means we should open some cell doors.

Stem cells taken from teeth can grow to resemble brain cells. Perhaps one dau they could be used in the brain as a therapy for stroke, say researchers at the University of Adelaide Centre for Stem Cell Research, who believe that although these cells haven't developed into fully fledged neurons, it may be just a matter of time and the right conditions for it to happen.
"Stem cells from teeth have great potential to grow into new brain or nerve cells, and this could potentially assist with treatments of brain disorders, such as stroke," says Dr Kylie Ellis, Commercial Development Manager with the University's commercial arm, Adelaide Research&Innovation (ARI).

Biomedical engineers at Columbia Engineering have successfully grown fully functional human cartilage in vitro from human stem cells derived from adult stem cells in bone marrow tissue. 

It's common to perceive Neanderthals as more big-headed primitives and Cro-Magnon as more like us, but we were all primitive cavemen. It takes a biologist to really know the difference.
So if you think Neanderthals were stupid and primitive, it's time to think again.  

The oldest sections of transform faults, such as the North Anatolian Fault Zone and the San Andreas Fault, produce the largest earthquakes, putting important limits on the potential seismic hazard for less mature parts of fault zones, according to a new presentation ("Fault-Zone Maturity Defines Maximum Earthquake Magnitude") at the Seismological Society of America 2014 Annual Meeting in Anchorage.

Babies begin to learn about the connection between pictures and real objects by the time they are nine-months-old, according to a new paper in Child Development.
Babies can learn about a toy from a photograph of it well before their first birthday, the scholars from Royal Holloway, University of London, and the University of South Carolina found. 
Researchers familiarized 30 eight and nine-month-olds with a life-sized photo of a toy for about a minute. The babies were then placed before the toy in the picture and a different toy and researchers watched to see which one the babies reached for first.