An international team of researchers has found at the free electron laser FLASH a surprising effect that leads in ferromagnetic materials to a spatially varying magnetization manipulation on an ultrafast timescale. This effect could be the key to further miniaturization and performance increase of magnetic data storage devices. From Mainz, the group of Professor Dr. Mathias Kläui from the Institute of Physics at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and in particular Felix Büttner, a member of the Graduate School of Excellence "Materials Science in Mainz", were involved. ...

Pop quiz! Tests are good for: (a) Assessing what you've learned; (b) Learning new information; (c) a & b; (d) None of the above. The correct answer? According to research from psychological science, it's both (a) and (b) – while testing can be useful as an assessment tool, the actual process of taking a test can also help us to learn and retain new information over the long term and apply it across different contexts. New research published in journals of the Association for Psychological Science explores the nuanced interactions between testing, memory, and learning ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- High-pressure systems over oceans, which largely determine the tracks of tropical cyclones and hydrological extremes in much of the northern hemisphere, are likely to intensify this century, according to a Duke University-led study. The study, published online this week in Nature Geoscience, suggests that as summertime near-surface high-pressure systems over the northern Pacific and Atlantic oceans strengthen, they could play an increasingly important role in shaping regional climate, particularly the occurrence of drought and extreme summer rainfall ...

Montreal, October 5, 2012 – From email to Twitter, blogs to word processors, computer programs provide countless communications opportunities. While social applications have dominated the development of the participatory web for users and programmers alike, this era of Web 2.0 is applicable to more than just networking opportunities: it impacts education. The integration of increasingly sophisticated information and communication tools (ICTs) is sweeping university classrooms. Understanding how learners and instructors perceive the effectiveness of these tools in the ...

Highlights Home hemodialysis could allow patients to enjoy increased freedom, quality of life, greater ability to travel, and tangible health improvements. Increased physician and patient education can eliminate barriers to home hemodialysis and increase its use. Approximately 2 million patients in the world receive some sort of dialysis treatment. Washington, DC (October 4, 2012) — Most patients with chronic kidney disease who undergo hemodialysis put up with a grueling treatment regimen that involves going into a clinic several days a week and sitting through a ...

To discover why Neandertals are most closely related to people outside Africa, Harvard and Max Planck Institute scientists have estimated the date when Neandertals and modern Europeans last shared ancestors. The research, published in the journal PLOS Genetics, provides a historical context for the interbreeding. It suggests that it occurred when modern humans carrying Upper Paleolithic technologies encountered Neandertals as they expanded out of Africa. When the Neandertal genome was sequenced in 2010 it revealed that people outside Africa share slightly more genetic ...

Bisphenol A or BPA is a synthetic chemical widely used in the making of plastic products ranging from bottles and food can linings to toys and water supply lines. When these plastics degrade, BPA is released into the environment and routinely ingested. New research, however, from the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine suggests it is the metabolic changes that take place once BPA is broken down inside the body that pose the greater health threat. More than 90 percent of all Americans are believed to carry varying levels of BPA exposure. In recent ...

As restaurant patrons' diverse food preferences give rise to varied menu offerings, so plant-eating insects' preferences play an important role in maintaining and shaping the genetic variation of their host plants in a geographic area, reports an international team of researchers that includes a plant scientist at the University of California, Davis. The new study, involving aphids and the broccoli-like research plant Arabidopsis thaliana, provides the first measureable evidence that this selective process is driven, in part, by the pressure that multiple natural enemies ...

Potsdam-Rehbruecke/Berlin – A research team led by Anna Floegel of the German Institute of Human Nutrition (DIfE) and Tobias Pischon of the Max Delbrueck Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) has identified 14 novel biomarkers for type 2 diabetes. They can serve as basis for developing new methods of treatment and prevention of this metabolic disease. The biomarkers can also be used to determine diabetes risk at a very early point in time. At the same time the markers enable insight into the complex mechanisms of this disease, which still have not been completely elucidated. ...

The tiny pieces of rock – at 50-100 micrometers smaller than a human hair – have been captured from asteroid Itokawa by the Japanese mission Hayabusa. They were carefully unpacked by experts at the University's School of Earth, Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences. It is the first time samples from an asteroid have been returned to Earth. Only about 70 samples have been released for international analysis – seven of these are being studied at the University. The Hayabusa mission is part of a continuing effort to understand how asteroids, which are leftovers from ...

Take a good look around on your next nature hike. Not only are you experiencing the wonders of the outdoors – you're probably also witnessing evolution in action. New research from the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM) on the effect of insects on plant populations has shown that evolution can happen more quickly than was previously assumed, even over a single generation. The study is to be published in the Oct. 5 issue of Science. "Scientists have long hypothesized that the interaction between plants and insects has led to much of the diversity we see among plants, ...

Providing birth control to women at no cost substantially reduced unplanned pregnancies and cut abortion rates by 62 percent to 78 percent over the national rate, a new study shows. The research, by investigators at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, appears online Oct. 4 in Obstetrics & Gynecology. Among a range of birth control methods offered in the study, most women chose long-acting methods like intrauterine devices (IUDs) or implants, which have lower failure rates than commonly used birth control pills. In the United States, IUDs and implants ...

Many chronically depressed and treatment-resistant patients experience immediate relief from symptoms after taking small amounts of the drug ketamine. For a decade, scientists have been trying to explain the observation first made at Yale University. Today, current evidence suggests that the pediatric anesthetic helps regenerate synaptic connections between brain cells damaged by stress and depression, according to a review of scientific research written by Yale School of Medicine researchers and published in the Oct. 5 issue of the journal Science. Ketamine works on ...

UCLA astronomers report the discovery of a remarkable star that orbits the enormous black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy in a blistering 11-and-a-half years — the shortest known orbit of any star near this black hole. The star, known as S0-102, may help astronomers discover whether Albert Einstein was right in his fundamental prediction of how black holes warp space and time, said research co-author Andrea Ghez, leader of the discovery team and a UCLA professor of physics and astronomy who holds the Lauren B. Leichtman and Arthur E. Levine Chair in Astrophysics. ...

Climate sceptics are being given a more prominent, and sometimes uncontested, voice in UK and US newspapers in contrast to other countries around the world, new research suggests. The findings have been published today, 5 October, in IOP Publishing's journal Environmental Research Letters, as part of a study looking at how climate scepticism manifested itself in the print media of the US, UK, Brazil, China, India and France during a 3-month period which included 'Climategate' in 2009/10 and a second period which covered the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report in 2007. In ...

A new mathematical method can help to predict a couple's chances of becoming pregnant, according to how long they have been trying. The model may also shed light on how long they should wait before seeking medical help. For example, the researchers have found that, if the woman is aged 35, after just six months of trying, her chance of getting pregnant in the next cycle is then less than 10 per cent. The analysis, developed at Warwick Medical School at the University of Warwick and the London School of Economics, uses the number of menstrual cycles over which the ...

Herbivorous insects, such as aphids, damage plants and can substantially reduce yields in agricultural settings; however, they can play a major role in maintaining genetic diversity. Ecologists Tobias Züst and Lindsay Turnbull from the University of Zurich together with colleagues from California and Great Britain demonstrated the importance of variation in herbivore communities using the model plant, Arabidopsis thaliana, also known as wall cress. According to Züst, the work is one of the first experimental confirmations of a forty-year-old theory that herbivorous insects ...

A team of paleontologists and engineers has found that duck-billed dinosaurs had an amazing capacity to chew tough and abrasive plants with grinding teeth more complex than those of cows, horses, and other well-known modern grazers. Their study, which is published today in the journal Science, is the first to recover material properties from fossilized teeth. Duck-bill dinosaurs, also known as hadrosaurids, were the dominant plant-eaters in what are now Europe, North America, and Asia during the Late Cretaceous about 85 million years ago. With broad jaws bearing as many ...

(Edmonton) Overweight children are far more likely to take prescription medications than children of a normal weight—a trend that adds to already higher health-care costs for treating childhood obesity, according to new research from the University of Alberta. Researchers from the School of Public Health analyzed the medication use of more than 2,000 Canadian children through the 2007 to 2009 Canadian Health Measures Survey. They found that overweight and obese kids aged 12 to 19 years were 59 per cent more likely than their normal-weight peers to take prescription medication. Co-author ...

Researchers have discovered a star that whips around the giant black hole at the center of our galaxy in record time, completing an orbit every 11.5 years. The finding, appearing today in the journal Science, points ahead to groundbreaking experiments involving Einstein's general theory of relativity. Those tests will be fully enabled by the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), slated to begin observations next decade. The record-setting star, called S0-102, was detected with the twin 10-meter telescopes at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. For the past 17 years, the telescopes ...

ELECTRICITY-- Spotlight on outages . . . When a storm knocks out power, among the first questions to be answered are how many people are affected and when electricity will be restored. Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Energy Awareness and Resiliency Standardized Services application, or EARSS, uses publicly available data and can help by showing grid status in real time. The goal is to enhance situational awareness for the emergency response community, according to EARSS co-developer Steve Fernandez of ORNL's Computational Sciences and Engineering Division. "Working from ...

RICHMOND, Va. (Oct. 4, 2012) – A new study reveals that a significant amount of carbon released into the atmosphere from lakes and rivers in Southern Québec, Canada, is very old – approximately 1,000 to 3,000 years old – challenging the current models of long-term carbon storage in lakes and rivers. Previous studies have suggested that there is a tight coupling between the terrestrial and aquatic environment such that aquatic bacteria rapidly consume modern carbon. The new findings of the respiration of old carbon in aquatic systems suggests there may be significant lags ...

New Haven, Conn.—Dramatic shifts in the planet's climate and geography over millions of years changed the course of evolutionary history for conifer trees, according to a Yale paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Yale researchers examined the fossil record and genetic makeup of 489 out of more than 600 living conifer species and discovered that while most conifers belong to ancient lineages, most Northern Hemisphere species, including the majority of pines and spruces, appeared within the past 5 million years. They argue that the migration ...

Controlling "mixing" between acceptor and donor layers, or domains, in polymer-based solar cells could increase their efficiency, according to a team of researchers that included physicists from North Carolina State University. Their findings shed light on the inner workings of these solar cells, and could lead to further improvements in efficiency. Polymer-based solar cells consist of two domains, known as the acceptor and the donor layers. Excitons, the energy particles created by solar cells, must be able to travel quickly to the interface of the donor and acceptor ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – More than 40 percent of older breast cancer survivors are insufficiently active after leaving a supervised program. But new research shows that those women who developed behavioral skills such as self-confidence and motivation during their program were far more likely to continue exercising on their own. Regular exercise may reduce the risk of breast cancer recurrence and breast cancer-related mortality, experts say, making it crucial to effectively target breast cancer survivors who do not engage in regular physical activity for interventions. Researchers ...