In this month's edition of Physics World, science writer Richard Corfield casts doubt on the alleged "brainwashing" of the late British astronomer Sir Bernard Lovell by the Soviets at the height of the Cold War and explains how his trips beyond the Iron Curtain laid the foundations for the easing of geopolitical tensions between the UK and the USSR. Speaking to Lovell's son Bryan, Corfield reveals a more mundane explanation for why Lovell, who founded the Jodrell Bank telescope in the UK, fell ill on his return from the USSR in 1963. "For me the more likely explanation ...

A study of young twins in Malawi, in sub-Saharan Africa, finds that bacteria living in the intestine are an underlying cause of a form of severe acute childhood malnutrition. The research, led by Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and reported Feb. 1 in the journal Science, shows how dysfunctional communities of gut microbes conspire with a poor diet to trigger malnutrition. The discovery is bolstered by additional studies in mice, showing that gut microbes transplanted from malnourished children cause dramatic weight loss and alter metabolism when ...

Winemakers have long known that blending different grape varietals can favorably balance the flavor characteristics of the wine they produce. In the future, makers of advanced biofuels might use a similar strategy, blending different feedstock varieties to balance the energy characteristics of the transportation fuel they produce. A collaborative study by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), a bioenergy research center led by Berkeley Lab, and the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) has shown that an ionic liquid proven ...

Jan. 30 2013 - Scientists have long known that cattle produce carbon dioxide and methane throughout their lives, but a new study pinpoints the cow-calf stage as a major contributor of greenhouse gases during beef production. In a new paper for the Journal of Animal Science, scientists estimate greenhouse gas emissions from beef cattle during different stages of life. They show that, depending on which production system farmers used, beef production has a carbon footprint ranging from 10.7 to 22.6 kg of carbon dioxide equivalent per kg of hot carcass weight. According ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Ecology is rife with predation, competition, and other dramatic "negative interactions," but those alone do not determine the course life on Earth. Organisms sometimes benefit each other, too, and according to the Stress Gradient Hypothesis, their "positive interactions" become measurably more influential when ecosystems become threatened by conditions such as drought. Ecologists have argued about the hypothesis ever since Brown University ecologist Mark Bertness co-proposed it in 1994; Bertness says a large new global meta-analysis ...

Peers exert a greater influence on teenage girls' dissatisfaction with their bodies than do thin ideals in television or social media use, according to new research¹ by Dr. Christopher J. Ferguson and colleagues from Texas A&M International University in the U.S. Their study is published online in Springer's Journal of Youth and Adolescence. The influence of the media on body image, life satisfaction, and symptoms of eating disorders in teenage girls is a hot debate. Some experts believe that media influences on body dissatisfaction may extend to symptoms of eating disorders. ...

LAS VEGAS, Nev. — Lake Mead National Recreation Area's water quality is good, the sport fish populations are sufficient, and the lakes provide important habitat for an increasing number of birds. This positive trend is documented in a new report published today that leads to a better understanding of the natural resources of Lake Mead and Lake Mohave, and the issues that may affect natural resource management of Lake Mead NRA. "While the Lake Mead ecosystem is generally healthy and robust, the minor problems documented in the report are all being addressed by the appropriate ...

Like many fungi and one-celled organisms, Candida albicans, a normally harmless microbe that can turn deadly, has long been thought to reproduce without sexual mating. But a new study by Professor Judith Berman and colleagues at the University of Minnesota and Tel Aviv University shows that C. albicans is capable of sexual reproduction. The finding, published online by Nature January 30, represents an important breakthrough in understanding how this pathogen has been shaped by evolution, which could suggest strategies for preventing and treating the often serious infections ...

New Rochelle, NY, January 30, 2013—Metabolic syndrome is more likely to affect children who are obese than overweight or non-overweight and who have other characteristics associated with the disorder, such as high blood pressure or insulin resistance. A new comprehensive and systematic review of the medical literature on metabolic syndrome in children that probed deeper to evaluate the risk associated with gender, ethnicity, and geography was published in Metabolic Syndrome and Related Disorders, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article ...

A pair of University of Colorado Cancer Center studies published this month show that the milk thistle extract, silibinin, kills skin cells mutated by UVA radiation and protects against damage by UVB radiation – thus protecting against UV-induced skin cancer and photo-aging. "When you have a cell affected by UV radiation, you either want to repair it or kill it so that it cannot go on to cause cancer. We show that silibinin does both," says Rajesh Agarwal, PhD, co-program leader of Cancer Prevention and Control at the CU Cancer Center and professor at the Skaggs School ...

A new study comparing outcomes among prostate cancer patients treated with surgery versus radiotherapy found differences in urinary, bowel and sexual function after short-term follow-up, but those differences were no longer significant 15 years after initial treatment. The study, led by first author Matthew Resnick, M.D., instructor in Urologic Surgery, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, was published in the Jan. 31 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. From Oct. 1, 1994, through Oct. 31, 1995, investigators enrolled men who had been diagnosed with localized ...

This press release is available in French. Montreal, January 20, 2013 – From Wikipedia to shareware, the Internet has made information and software more widely available than ever. At the heart of this explosion is the simple idea that information should be open and free for anyone. Yet with publishers charging exorbitant fees for subscriptions to academic journals, university libraries are struggling to keep up. Writing in the Journal of Academic Librarianship, Concordia collections librarian Geoffrey Little says that a key way to meet that challenge is through ...

PASADENA, Calif.—The skin is a human being's largest sensory organ, helping to distinguish between a pleasant contact, like a caress, and a negative sensation, like a pinch or a burn. Previous studies have shown that these sensations are carried to the brain by different types of sensory neurons that have nerve endings in the skin. Only a few of those neuron types have been identified, however, and most of those detect painful stimuli. Now biologists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have identified in mice a specific class of skin sensory neurons that ...

Boulder, Colorado, USA – In the February 2013 issue of GSA Today, Sean Gallen and his colleagues from the Department of Marine, Earth, and Atmospheric Sciences at North Carolina State University take a new look at the origin of the Miocene rejuvenation of topographic relief in the southern Appalachians. Conventional wisdom holds that the southern Appalachian Mountains have not experienced a significant phase of tectonic forcing for more than 200 million years; yet, they share many characteristics with tectonically active settings, including locally high topographic relief, ...

According to a new study of more than 75,000 adults, women in that age group are more empathic than men of the same age and than younger or older people. "Overall, late middle-aged adults were higher in both of the aspects of empathy that we measured," says Sara Konrath, co-author of an article on age and empathy forthcoming in the Journals of Gerontology: Psychological and Social Sciences. "They reported that they were more likely to react emotionally to the experiences of others, and they were also more likely to try to understand how things looked from the perspective ...

Worldwide, many strains of the bacterium Staphyloccocus aureus, commonly known as staph infections, are already resistant to all antibiotics except vancomycin. But as bacteria are becoming resistant to this once powerful antidote, S. aureus has moved one step closer to becoming an unstoppable killer. Now, researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have not only identified the mechanism by which vancomycin resistance spreads from one bacterium to the next, but also have suggested ways to potentially stop the transfer. The work, led by Matthew Redinbo, ...

Binge drinking causes insulin resistance, which increases the risk of Type 2 diabetes, according to the results of an animal study led by researchers at the Diabetes Obesity and Metabolism Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. The authors further discovered that alcohol disrupts insulin-receptor signaling by causing inflammation in the hypothalamus area of the brain. The results are published in the January 30 issue of the journal Science Translational Medicine. "Insulin resistance has emerged as a key metabolic defect leading to Type 2 diabetes ...

Patients are currently being enrolled in the first clinical trial to investigate the efficacy of immunological therapy for chronic pulmonary sarcoidosis. The trial is being conducted by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Mount Sinai has the largest Sarcoidosis Service in the world and is one of only two institutions in the country participating in the trial; the other is the University of Cincinnati. Mount Sinai is a National Institutes of Health Center of Excellence for research in sarcoidosis. "The current standard treatment for chronic pulmonary ...

Researchers at Rochester Institute of Technology, international semiconductor consortium SEMATECH and Texas State University have demonstrated that use of new methods and materials for building integrated circuits can reduce power—extending battery life to 10 times longer for mobile applications compared to conventional transistors. The key to the breakthrough is a tunneling field effect transistor. Transistors are switches that control the movement of electrons through material to conduct the electrical currents needed to run circuits. Unlike standard transistors, which ...

A powerful cold front moving from the central United States to the East Coast is wiping out spring-like temperatures and replacing them with winter-time temperatures with powerful storms in between. An image released from NASA using data from NOAA's GOES-13 satellite provides a stunning look at the powerful system that brings a return to winter weather in its wake. On Jan. 30 at 1825 UTC (1:25 p.m. EST), NOAA's GOES-13 satellite captured an image of clouds associated with the strong cold front. The visible GOES-13 image shows a line of clouds that stretch from Canada ...

False-colored night-time satellite imagery from NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite clearly shows bands of thunderstorms wrapping into the eye of Cyclone Felleng as it parallels the coast of eastern Madagascar. The Visible Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) aboard NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite captured a night-time image of Cyclone Felleng when it was located east of Madagascar (4:09 p.m. EST/Jan. 30 at 12:09 a.m. local time, Madagascar). The image was created at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was false colored to reveal temperatures. The image shows powerful ...

Two Rutgers physics professors have proposed an explanation for a new type of order, or symmetry, in an exotic material made with uranium – a theory that may one day lead to enhanced computer displays and data storage systems and more powerful superconducting magnets for medical imaging and levitating high-speed trains. Their discovery, published in this week's issue of the journal Nature, has piqued the interest of scientists worldwide. It is one of the rare theory-only papers that this selective publication accepts. Typically the journal's papers describe results of ...

Nominated early this year for recognition on the UNESCO World Heritage List, which includes such famous cultural sites as the Taj Mahal, Machu Picchu and Stonehenge, the earthen works at Poverty Point, La., have been described as one of the world's greatest feats of construction by an archaic civilization of hunters and gatherers. Now, new research in the current issue of the journal Geoarchaeology, offers compelling evidence that one of the massive earthen mounds at Poverty Point was constructed in less than 90 days, and perhaps as quickly as 30 days — an incredible ...

London – In response to a complaint by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the European Ombudsman has launched an inquiry into the actions of the European Union (EU) agency responsible for the administration of the REACH chemical-testing program, which is expected to consume millions of animals in toxicity tests. PETA's complaint, submitted in July 2012, alleges that the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) is not properly investigating cases in which animal testing could be avoided under the rules of REACH. PETA maintains that evidence derived from public documents ...

Hydrogen has tremendous potential as an eco-friendly fuel, but it is expensive to produce. Now researchers at Princeton University and Rutgers University have moved a step closer to harnessing nature to produce hydrogen for us. The team, led by Princeton chemistry professor Annabella Selloni, takes inspiration from bacteria that make hydrogen from water using enzymes called di-iron hydrogenases. Selloni's team uses computer models to figure out how to incorporate the magic of these enzymes into the design of practical synthetic catalysts that humans can use to produce ...