News Articles

You can always tell when someone does not have a lot of experience in something. They are anxious, they start too soon, perhaps confused. With practice and training, situations become rote. Athletes talk about how time slows down when they have locked into what they are doing.
Older brains are more experienced, obviously, and a new paper in Topics in Cognitive Science finds that rather than being a decline in brain function, older brains may take longer to process because they have ever increasing amounts of knowledge.

Near the center of Antarctica, measurements from CryoSat - which exists to make comprehensive measurements of the polar regions in an unusually high-inclination orbit and latitudes of 88° north and south -  have detected an unusual pattern in the ice sheet’s elevation.  CryoSat carries a radar altimeter that can ‘see’ through clouds and in the dark, providing continuous measurements over areas like central Antarctica that are prone to bad weather and long periods of darkness.  The radar measures the surface height variation of ice by timing the interval between the transmission and reception of very short radar pulses as the satellite orbits Earth. CryoSat collects data over Antarctica while passing on northbound and southbound orbits.

A new protocol for conducting Miller-Urey Experiments is comprised of a modern and simplified approach to the method used by Dr. Stanley Miller and Dr. Harold Urey in 1953. Their research evaluated the possibility of organic compounds important for the origin of life to have been formed abiologically on early Earth. 

A new paper finds that concussions are common among middle-school girls who play soccer, and most continue to play with symptoms.
Using a small sample of email survey and interviews, the authors evaluated the frequency and duration of concussions in young female soccer players, as well as whether the injuries resulted in stopping play and seeking medical attention.  There are no injury-tracking systems for younger players but the background information says that sports-related concussions account for 1.6 to 3.8 million injuries in the United States annually, including about 50,000 soccer-related concussions among high school players.

Someone who wants to commit suicide, or a homicide, is not prevented by a lack of guns, but access makes it easier. 
A meta-analysis, a statistical look at various studies that shows patterns, published in Annals of Internal Medicine, pooled results from 15 investigations, slightly more than half of which were done after a 1996 federal law prohibited the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services from funding research that promotes gun control.

When tragedies happen, politicians aim to yell on the floors of Congress about how tragedies must be stopped. And gun tragedies should be entirely preventable, claim gun ban proponents. Just ban guns. It may make sense to assume that states in which there are tight laws make that state safer and lead to less gun crime, but that data show that the very opposite is true. You can't get a concealed weapon permit in Illinois but Chicago leads the US in gun murders. In 2013, a concealed carry bill was passed, making Illinois the final state to issue concealed gun carry permits.

Plants, like almost all living organisms, have an internal communication system to respond to external stimuli. Whether they are exposed to sunlight, pollutants, nutrients or pests, plants react with a tell-tale electrical signal. The PLEASED project is trying to understand these signals and decipher them to devise new "holistic" environmental biosensors. Andrea Vitaletti, professor of computer engineering at W-LAB of the University of Rome, Italy, who is also the project coordinator, spoke to youris.com about using plants as pollution sensing devices.

Rosetta is currently chasing down Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, where it will become the first space mission to rendezvous with a comet, the first to attempt a landing on a comet’s surface and the first to follow a comet as it swings around the Sun.But for 31 months it has been radio silent. It is powered by solar energy and was placed into deep space slumber in June of 2011 as it cruised out to a distance of nearly 500 million miles from Sol, beyond the orbit of Jupiter. Now it is only about 400 million miles from the Sun and has enough solar energy to power back up.To everyone's relief, it did. 

Going barefoot in parts of Africa, Asia and South America is dangerous.
Hookworms live in the soil and enter the body through the feet. By feeding on victims' blood, the worms cause anemia and, in children, stunted growth and learning problems. These infections afflict an estimated 700 million of the world's poor. 
Researchers have decoded the genome of the hookworm, Necator americanus, finding clues to how it infects and survives in humans. Necator americanus causes about 85 percent of human hookworm infections, which are not usually fatal. However, in pregnant women, the worm can cause severe anemia, leading to maternal deaths and low birth weights that contribute to newborn deaths.

Researchers have discovered the genetic machinery that turns the common gut bacterium Bacteroides ovatus
 into the Swiss Army knife of the digestive tract, helping us metabolize a main component of dietary fiber from the cell walls of fruits and vegetables.
The findings illuminate the specialized roles played by key members of the vast microbial community living in the human gut, and could inform the development of tailored microbiota transplants to improve intestinal health after antibiotic use or illness. 
 About 92 percent of the population harbors bacteria with a variant of the gene sequence, according to the researchers' survey of public genome data from 250 adult humans. 

A new paper claims that exposure to secondhand smoke at home or in the car increases the odds of children being readmitted to the hospital within a year of being admitted for asthma.

A new estimate has said that tidal power generated by turbines placed in the Pentland Firth, between mainland Scotland and Orkney, could power about half of Scotland - they estimate 1.9 gigawatts could be available.