Curated News: Staff Picks

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Half of all stars are in binaries — pairs of stars that orbit each other. Half of binary stars orbit so close that gravitational interaction significantly affects their evolution and demise. Today, scientists led by Robert Mathieu, a professor of astronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and his former student Natalie Gosnell confirmed one of the possible explanations for a common group of exceptions: the blue stragglers.

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People who are diagnosed with mental health conditions did not see improvements in coordination and quality of care as hoped but did not experience large cuts in access as some had feared under an early alternative payment model designed to encourage coordinated health care, according to a team led by researchers from Harvard Medical School and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

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Men taking androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) for prostate cancer were almost twice as likely to be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in the years that followed than those who didn’t undergo the therapy, an analysis of medical records from two large hospital systems by Penn Medicine and Stanford University researchers has shown.

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A study published in the journal Antiquity explains how the bluestones that make up the famous neolithic monument in Salisbury Plain in England, were dug out at least 500 years before in Wales. Stonehenge may have stood in Wales hundreds of years before it was dismantled and transported.

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A study published in the journal Antiquity explains how the bluestones that make up the famous neolithic monument in Salisbury Plain in England, were dug out at least 500 years before in Wales. Stonehenge may have stood in Wales hundreds of years before it was dismantled and transported.

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A new study by a team of scientists from Argentina, Brazil, California and the Natural History Museum of Utah at the University of Utah has determined that the time elapsed between the emergence of early dinosaur relatives and the origin of the first dinosaurs is much shorter than previously believed.

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Spermatozoa need to crane their necks to turn right to counteract a left-turning drive caused by the rotation of their tails, new research has found. Led by Dr Vasily Kantsler of the University of Warwick’s Department of Physics, the researchers discovered that all sperm tails (flagella) rotate in a counter-clockwise motion as they beat to enable them to move through and against the motion of a fluid.

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Including plants' acclimation to changes in temperature could significantly improve the accuracy of climate models, a Purdue University study shows.

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Never mind the ABCs. Rice University scientists interested in nanotubes are studying their XYΩs. Carbon nanotubes grown in a furnace aren't always straight. Sometimes they curve and kink, and sometimes they branch off in several directions. The Rice researchers realized they now had the tools available to examine just how tough those branches are.

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Having a pet offers companionship, comfort and emotional security to millions; many love and cherish them like family members. This can in turn have positive effects on mental health.

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Migraines can be triggered by a variety of factors, including stress, sleep disruption, noise, odors, and diet. The findings of a new Headache review indicate that many of these factors converge on a common pathway involving oxidative stress.

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Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have discovered the most tenuous molecular gas ever observed. They detected the absorption of radio waves by gas clouds in front of bright radio sources. This radio shadow revealed the composition and conditions of diffuse gas in the Milky Way galaxy.

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Two studies by Dartmouth researchers and their colleagues shed new light on mercury pollution in the waters of the northeastern United States.

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University of Washington researchers have reconstructed 3-D models of celebrities such as Tom Hanks from large Internet photo collections. The models can deliver speeches that the real actor never performed - one step toward developing fully interactive digital models of people from family or historic photo collections.

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Plenty of companies invest big money to provide their employees with upscale workplace eateries or at least catered meals. But are those companies getting a good return on their investment? According to a new Cornell University study, the answer is yes.

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A University of Sydney study has revealed that tooth decay (dental caries) can be stopped, reversed, and prevented without the need for the traditional 'fill and drill' approach that has dominated dental care for decades.

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Gene therapy can safely rebuild the immune systems of older children and young adults with X-linked severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID-X1), a rare inherited disorder that primarily affects males, scientists from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, have found. NIAID's Suk See De Ravin, M.D., Ph.D., is scheduled to describe the findings at the 57th American Society of Hematology Annual Meeting in Orlando, Florida.

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Researchers at the University of Georgia have found links between certain patterns of connections among Facebook friends and drug and alcohol use among college-aged females.

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Young men’s interest in babies is specifically associated with their physiological reactivity to sexually explicit material, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

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Parkinson’s disease researchers at the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University at Buffalo have developed a way to ramp up the conversion of skin cells into dopamine neurons. They have identified – and found a way to overcome –a key obstacle to such cellular conversions.

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Yale Cancer Center researchers have developed a vaccine strategy that reduces the risk of flu infections in cancer patients at highest risk for influenza. The findings were presented Dec. 6 at the 57th annual meeting of the American Society of Hematology in Orlando, Florida.

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A 13,000 year-old engraving uncovered in Spain may depict a hunter-gatherer campsite, according to a study published December 2, 2015 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Marcos García-Diez from University of the Basque Country, Spain, and Manuel Vaquero from Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution - IPHES, Spain.

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By examining rocks at the bottom of ancient oceans, an international group of researchers have revealed that arsenic concentrations in the oceans have varied greatly over time. But also that in the very early oceans, arsenic co-varied with the rise of atmospheric oxygen and coincided with the coming and going of global glaciations. The study was recently published in the Nature Group Journal, Scientific Reports.

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Workplace incivility should be treated with the utmost seriousness. This is the finding of three psychologists at Lund University in Sweden who surveyed nearly 6 000 people on the social climate in the workplace. Their studies show that being subjected to rudeness is a major reason for dissatisfaction at work and that unpleasant behaviour spreads if nothing is done about it.

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Nanoscale octopods that do double duty as catalysts and plasmonic sensors are lighting a path toward more efficient industrial processes, according to a Rice University scientist.

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The Genome Analysis Centre (TGAC) in collaboration with IBERS, has sequenced and assembled the DNA of red clover to help breeders improve the beneficial traits of this important forage crop. The genome is published in Scientific Reports, a journal from the Nature publishing group.

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Jami Fisher, a lecturer in the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Linguistics, has a long history with American Sign Language. Both of her parents and her brother are deaf, she's Penn's ASL Program coordinator and now, with Meredith Tamminga, an assistant professor in Linguistics and director of the University's Language Variation and Cognition Lab, she's working on a project to document what they're calling the Philadelphia accent of this language.

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A dolphin’s echolocation beam was directed at a submerged man and the echo captured by a hydrophone system. The echo signal was sent to a sound imaging laboratory who created the first ever ‘what-the-dolphin-saw’ image of the submerged man, by using a cymatic-holographic imaging technique.

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Turns out dads are also eating for two. A study published December 3 in Cell Metabolism reveals that a man's weight affects the heritable information contained in sperm. The sperm cells of lean and obese men possess different epigenetic marks, notable at gene regions associated with the control of appetite. The comparisons, which included 13 lean men and 10 obese men, offer one biological explanation for why children of obese fathers are themselves more predisposed to obesity.

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Northwestern University neuroscientists now can read the mind of a fly. In a study focused on three of the fruit fly’s sensory systems, the researchers developed a new tool that uses fluorescent molecules of different colors to tag neurons in the brain to see which connections, or synapses, were active during a sensory experience that happened hours earlier. Mapping the pattern of individual neural connections could provide insights into the computational processes that underlie the workings of the human brain.

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A new study published in PLOS ONE found that the Transcendental Meditation technique and lifestyle changes both appear to stimulate genes that produce telomerase, an enzyme that's associated with reduced blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, and mortality.

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Several studies have demonstrated that the primary active constituent of cannabis, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (∆9-THC), induces transient psychosis-like effects in healthy subjects similar to those observed in schizophrenia. However, the mechanisms underlying these effects are not clear.

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Researchers at Linköping University's Laboratory of Organic Electronics, Sweden, have developed power paper -- a new material with an outstanding ability to store energy. The material consists of nanocellulose and a conductive polymer. The results have been published in Advanced Science.

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Researchers at North Carolina State University say they have developed a technique for creating a substance they are calling Q-carbon, which represents a third phase, or distinct form, of carbon alongside graphite and diamond.

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What is the climate waiting for Russia and Europe in 15-20 years? Will be there weather abnormalities in the coming decades? Will some areas experience more severe winter, while the others will have hot summer? It all depends on how much the climate will be affected by the dynamics of the possible onset of minimum solar magnetic activity. The Sun's behaviour in future cycles is the main theme of a publication on the forecast and explanation of the minima of solar activity.

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Researchers at North Carolina State University say they have developed a technique for creating a substance they are calling Q-carbon, which represents a third phase, or distinct form, of carbon alongside graphite and diamond.

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Using the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, astronomers have detected a very compact and faint early galaxy that was forming 400 million years after the big bang.

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Scientists at Seattle Children’s Research Institute have found a way to rapidly suppress epilepsy in mouse models by manipulating a known genetic pathway using a cancer drug currently in human clinical trials for the treatment of brain and breast cancer.

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The Sun demonstrates the potential to superflare, new research into stellar flaring suggests.

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New research from of the Sexuality and Gender Laboratory at Queen's University shows that heterosexual women have more diverse patterns of sexual response than previously reported.

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Investing in simple diagnostic tests could save lives and end disease epidemics in the developing world, say researchers in a supplement in the journal Nature.

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UK researchers stumbled across several hundred dinosaur footprints in a coastal lagoon on the Isle of Skye, which they dated to the Middle Jurassic, 170 million years ago. The researchers, which include Stephen Brusatte from the University of Edinburgh, UK and his colleague Tom Challands, surmise that the footprints were left by sauropods, primitive cousins of the more famous Brontosaurus and Diplodocus. The largest of the footprints measure around 70 centimetres across, larger than those that would have been left by T. Rex. This find is the largest dinosaur site found in Scotland to date. The researchers report their findings in the Scottish Journal of Geology.

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UK researchers stumbled across several hundred dinosaur footprints in a coastal lagoon on the Isle of Skye, which they dated to the Middle Jurassic, 170 million years ago. The researchers, which include Stephen Brusatte from the University of Edinburgh, UK and his colleague Tom Challands, surmise that the footprints were left by sauropods, primitive cousins of the more famous Brontosaurus and Diplodocus. The largest of the footprints measure around 70 centimetres across, larger than those that would have been left by T. Rex. This find is the largest dinosaur site found in Scotland to date. The researchers report their findings in the Scottish Journal of Geology.

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Dr. Yoichi Ochi of Tsukuba University and his team have come up with an unique way to display 3D holograms that are touchable using a technology called femtosecond laser technology. The technology uses pulses that can be manipulated with human touch. Combined with mirrors and cameras, the rapid, high-intensity lasers direct tiny light points called voxels in certain directions to produce images of up to 200,000 dots per second of resolution.

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Dr. Yoichi Ochi of Tsukuba University and his team have come up with an unique way to display 3D holograms that are touchable using a technology called femtosecond laser technology. The technology uses pulses that can be manipulated with human touch. Combined with mirrors and cameras, the rapid, high-intensity lasers direct tiny light points called voxels in certain directions to produce images of up to 200,000 dots per second of resolution.

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Matter known as ordinary corresponds to only 5% of the Universe. Numerical simulations made it possible to predict that the rest of this ordinary matter should be located in the large-scale structures that form the “cosmic web”. A team led by the University of Geneva observed this phenomenon. The research shows that the majority of the missing ordinary matter is found in the form of a very hot gas associated with intergalactic filaments.

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A team of astronomers, including a West Virginia University professor, has uncovered the most detailed record ever of a Fast Radio Burst, or FRB, brief yet brilliant eruptions of cosmic radio waves that have baffled astronomers since they were first reported nearly a decade ago. The results of their research are published in the journal Nature.

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Researchers at FAU and colleagues put to test the hypothesis that adolescents become less similar to their friends and more similar to romantic partners after they start a new romantic relationship.

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Women with a history of a false-positive mammogram result may be at increased risk of developing breast cancer for up to 10 years after the false-positive result, according to a study led by a researcher with the University of North Carolina Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center.

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A planet discovered last year sitting at an unusually large distance from its star - 16 times farther than Pluto is from the sun - may have been kicked out of its birthplace close to the star in a process similar to what may have happened early in our own solar system's history.