News Articles

United States dominance in science and technology declined  during the last decade as several Asian nations rapidly increased their innovation capacities.
According to a new report, The 2014 volume of Science and Engineering Indicators prepared by NSF's National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES), the major Asian economies, taken together, now perform a larger share of global R&D than the U.S., and China performs nearly as much of the world's high-tech manufacturing as the U.S.

Symmetry isn't always good. When we look at human faces, the most symmetrical, where one half is mirrored to the other, are less attractive than faces that show some distinction.
And it isn't just culture. A study in brains found that too much symmetry is also bad. Fish that have symmetric brains show defects in processing information about sights and smells, according to a new paper
in Current Biology. 
It's widely believed that the left and right sides of the brain have slightly different roles in cognition and in regulating behavior, but whether or not these asymmetries actually matter for the efficient functioning of the brain is unknown

Researchers stray from the usual heteronormative parameters in a new take on determining the relationship between love and sex.  They collected data from an Internet-based survey of almost 25,000 gay and bisexual men residing in the United States who were members of online websites facilitating social or sexual interactions with men. 
The survey results determined that nearly all (92.6 percent) of the men whose most recent sexual event occurred with a relationship partner indicated being in love with the partner at the time they had sex. So experiences of love among people are far more similar than different, regardless of sexual orientation.  

Last year, a group of researchers created a correlation between the migration patterns of ocean salmon and the Earth's magnetic field, suggesting it may help explain how the fish can navigate across thousands of miles of water to find their river of origin.

A new review doesn't add any value to supplements but at least it shows that people who spend money on supplements are more inclined to be developing a healthier lifestyle overall.
The review by  Council for Responsible Nutrition (CRN) consultant Annette Dickinson, Ph.D., and CRN's senior vice president, scientific and regulatory affairs, Duffy MacKay, N.D., only covered 20 articles, and those were all surveys anyway, so it's no surprise they found what they set out to find, that "overall, the evidence suggests that users of dietary supplements are seeking wellness and are consciously adopting a variety of lifestyle habits that they consider to contribute to healthy living." 

The DiscoverE outreach program and its Girls Coding Club program teaching computer programming to girls from grades 3 to 9, has won a Google RISE Award. Last year, DiscoverE, an initiative by the University of Alberta Faculty of Engineering, became the first Canadian group ever to win a RISE Award, now in their fifth year, and now it is first to win two.  

It's the time of year when experts on relationships give advice. Not experts on their own, but rather experts on yours.
All that's needed is a weak observational study based on surveys and it practically writes itself.

Are American jobs less stable? Do workers change employers more frequently than in the past?
The reflexive answer is yes, especially since unemployment is the worst it's been in decades, but on average that is not the case. On average, job tenure (the number of years working for the same employer) has been reasonably stable over time between 1983 and 2008 - though that obviously leaves out the 1970s and the recent prolonged economic troubles. 

You learned in high school that light has a dual nature - it exists as both waves and photons. It is this duality of light that enables the coherent transport of photons in lasers. 
Physicists know that, at the atomic-scale, sound has the same dual nature, existing as both waves and quasi-particles known as phonons. Knowing that, phonon-based lasers have also been in development since the first functioning laser was created in 1960, with limited success.

Nine years ago, Dennis Aabo Sørensen of Denmark lost the use of his left hand handling fireworks during a family holiday. 
Now he has become the first amputee in the world to feel sensory-rich information, in real-time,  with a prosthetic hand wired to nerves in his upper arm.
Silvestro Micera and a team at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and SSSA (Italy) developed the sensory feedback that allowed Sørensen to feel while handling objects.
A prototype of the bionic technology was tested in February 2013 during a clinical trial in Rome under the supervision of Paolo Maria Rossini at Gemelli Hospital (Italy). The study represents a collaboration called Lifehand 2 between several European universities and hospitals. 

When it comes to discussion about public schools, the administation's education experts call the educators and students they claim to support 'dismal' on a regular basis.

Stars like Sol are relatively easy to understand, because they are numerous, and live for billions of years, but high mass stars are rare and live for only a few million years. As a result, understanding their early evolution has been a challenge.  Simple models suggested that when high mass stars become hot enough to ionize the gas around them, heating it to thousands of degrees, the gas will quickly expand. But decades ago, astronomers found that regions of ionized gas around young high mass stars remain small (under a third of a light-year) for ten times longer than they should if they were to expand as predicted.