Other Sciences News

An artist’s illustration of a comet impact on Earth. Image credit: Don Davis / NASA.

Researchers: Comet Collided with Earth 55.6 Million Years Ago

Oct 14, 2016 by News Staff

A team of researchers led by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has found evidence that a comet hit the Earth at the same time a mysterious release of carbon...

Altered microRNAs in anxiety and metabolic disorders. Image credit: Chanan Meydan et al, doi: 10.1016/j.molmed.2016.07.001.

Scientists Find Molecular Link between Anxiety and Metabolic Disorders

Oct 12, 2016 by News Staff

Scientists in Israel have identified molecular elements that bridge anxiety and metabolism — a type of microRNA that influences shared biological...

Drink water according to thirst rather than a schedule, researchers recommend. Image credit: Photoshot.

New Study Challenges Popular Idea of Mandatory Water Intake

Oct 11, 2016 by News Staff

A study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences challenges the popular idea that we should drink 8 glasses of water...

Schematic of a transistor with a molybdenum disulfide channel and 1-nm carbon nanotube gate. Image credit: Sujay Desai / Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Researchers Create World’s Smallest Transistor

Oct 6, 2016 by News Staff

A team of scientists headed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory researcher Prof. Ali Javey has used carbon nanotubes and a compound called molybdenum...

Example applications for on-body communication using the fingerprint sensors on smartphones. The smartphone can securely send information to doorknobs or glucose sensors over the body. Image credit: Vikram Iyer / University of Washington.

Scientists Find Way to Send Passwords via Human Body

Oct 3, 2016 by News Staff

A new technique devised by a team of researchers at the University of Washington leverages the signals already generated by fingerprint sensors on smartphones...

Study: Eating Raw Lettuce, Apple Can Stop Garlic Breath

Sep 29, 2016 by News Staff

Eating raw apple or lettuce may help deodorize garlic breath, according to a study by scientists at the Ohio State University (OSU). Garlic. Image credit:...

This image shows thirst neurons (blue) in mouse SCN. Image credit: C. Gizowski et al / McGill University.

Study Says Biological Clock Stimulates Thirst before Sleep

Sep 29, 2016 by News Staff

According to a study in rodents led by Prof. Charles Bourque of McGill University, the brain’s biological clock stimulates thirst in the hours before...

Mosaic of the Valles Marineris hemisphere of Mars projected into point perspective, a view similar to that which one would see from a spacecraft. The distance is 1,550 miles (2,500 km) from the surface of the planet. The mosaic is composed of 102 Viking Orbiter images of Mars. The center of the scene shows the entire Valles Marineris canyon system, over 1,240 miles (2,000 km) long and up to 5 miles (8 km) deep, extending form Noctis Labyrinthus, the arcuate system of graben to the west, to the chaotic terrain to the east. Many huge ancient river channels begin from the chaotic terrain from north-central canyons and run north. The three Tharsis volcanoes (dark red spots), each about 15.5 miles (25 km) high, are visible to the west. South of Valles Marineris is very ancient terrain covered by many impact craters. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech.

Marsquakes Could Support Life Deep within the Red Planet

Sep 28, 2016 by James Romero

The combination of seismic activity and water locked away at depth within Mars could be releasing sufficient hydrogen gas to support communities of microorganisms,...

Oxytocin supports spirituality. Image credit: Duke University.

Research: Oxytocin Enhances Spirituality

Sep 27, 2016 by News Staff

Oxytocin – a polypeptide hormone produced mainly by the hypothalamus and stored in the pituitary gland – gives greater sense of spirituality...

Denisovans were probably dark-skinned, unlike the pale Neandertals. The picture shows a Neanderthal man. Image credit: Mauro Cutrona.

Researchers Identify Archaic Hominins Associated with Chatelperronian Tool Technology

Sep 23, 2016 by News Staff

An international team of researchers led by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany has demonstrated that Neanderthals were responsible...

Depiction of the Jarijari (Nyeri Nyeri) people near Merbein engaged in recreational activities, including a type of Aboriginal football, by William Blandowski & Gustav Mützel, 1857.

Unprecedented Genomic Study Shines Light on Ancestry of Indigenous Australians

Sep 22, 2016 by News Staff

The first comprehensive genomic study of Indigenous Australians has revealed that they are indeed the direct descendants of Australia’s earliest settlers...

Damian Scarf et al. demonstrate that pigeons (Columba livia) trained to discriminate words from non-words picked up on the orthographic properties that define words and used this knowledge to identify words they had never seen before. Image credit: Damian Scarf / University of Otago.

Study: Pigeons Can Learn to Visually Recognize Words

Sep 18, 2016 by News Staff

Pigeons (Columba livia) can learn to distinguish real words from non-words by visually processing their letter combinations, according to a surprising...

This image shows a pellet of plutonium-238 dioxide. The pellet is glowing red because of the heat generated by the radioactive decay (primarily alpha) of the fuel. Such pellets were used in radioisotope thermoelectric generators that powered NASA’s Galilleo and Cassini spacecraft on missions to Jupiter and Saturn, respectively. Image credit: Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Plutonium Acts Like Ions in a Salt, New Study Shows

Sep 16, 2016 by News Staff

Plutonium, a heavy, silvery metal with 15 isotopes that is produced by the neutron irradiation of natural uranium, is formidably complex element that does...

Top and side views of 136-atom (upper row) and 374-atom (lower row) silver nanoclusters: the metal cores of these clusters have a diameter of 2 and 3 nm, respectively; silver atoms in the metal core are denoted by large orange sphere; the core is protected by a silver-thiol layer (green: silver; yellow: sulfur; carbon: gray. Image credit: Huayan Yang et al.

Researchers Create Record-Breaking Silver Nanoparticles

Sep 13, 2016 by News Staff

An international team of researchers has synthesized and characterized two diamond-shaped nanoclusters of 136 and 374 silver atoms. Top and side views...

Group work can harm memory, researchers say.

Study Shows Group Work Can Harm Memory

Sep 13, 2016 by News Staff

A new study published in the Psychological Bulletin reveals that collaborating in a group to remember information is harmful. Group work can harm memory,...

Geographic distribution of the 6,452 word lists analyzed in this study. Colors distinguish different linguistic macroareas, regions with relatively little or no contact between them (but with much internal contact between their populations). These are North America (orange), South America (dark green), Eurasia (blue), Africa (green), Papua New Guinea and the Pacific Islands (red), and Australia (fuchsia). Image credit: Damián E. Blasi et al.

Unrelated Languages Often Use Same Sounds for Common Objects and Ideas, Research Finds

Sep 13, 2016 by News Staff

A careful statistical examination of words from 6,000+ languages shows that humans tend to use the same sounds for common objects and ideas, no matter...

A colorized scanning electron micrograph of human hair. Image credit: Scanning Electron Microscopy Laboratory, University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Scientists Develop Forensic Method to Identify Humans Using Hair Proteins

Sep 12, 2016 by News Staff

A Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory-led interdisciplinary research team has developed the first-ever biological identification method that exploits...

Moon. Image credit: Gregory H. Revera / CC BY-SA 3.0.

Moon is Proto-Earth’s Mantle, Researchers Say

Sep 12, 2016 by News Staff

Measurements of potassium in lunar and terrestrial rocks have disproved the leading hypotheses for the origin of Earth’s sole natural satellite. Moon....

The Relative Citation Ratio is article level and field independent and provides an alternative to the invalid practice of using journal impact factors to identify influential papers. Image credit: Unsplash.

Relative Citation Ratio: New Metric Measures Influence of Scientific Research

Sep 8, 2016 by News Staff

A team of researchers at the National Institute of Health led by George Santangelo has developed a new article-level metric: the Relative Citation Ratio. The...