THE NEWS POINTER

Kepler 16b The World With Two Suns Like Tatooine

2011-09-16T06:25:00.002+02:00

Unlike Star Wars’ Tatooine, the planet is cold, gaseous and not thought to harbor life, but its discovery demonstrates the diversity of planets in our galaxy. Previous research has hinted at the existence of circumbinary planets, but clear confirmation proved elusive. Kepler detected such a planet, known as Kepler-16b, by observing transits, where the brightness of a parent star dims from the planet crossing in front of it... [more]
Source : Nasa

South Pole's Dog-sized Dinosaurs

2011-08-05T14:05:00.003+02:00

Dog-sized dinosaurs that lived near the South Pole, sometimes in the dark for months at a time, had bone tissue very similar to dinosaurs that lived everywhere on the planet, that surprising fact falsifies a 13-year-old study and may help explain why dinosaurs were able to dominate the planet for 160 million years... [more]

Source : Montana State University

The mother of all polar bears come from British Isles

2011-07-08T02:47:00.002+02:00

Scientists have traced the maternal ancestry of modern polar bears to a female brown bear that lived in the vicinity of Britain and Ireland prior to the peak of the last ice age when polar bears and brown bears probably interbred regularly... [more]

Source : Independent

Charles Darwin's Insectivorous Plants Returned 122 Years Later to Library

2011-06-23T02:58:00.002+02:00

A stamp inside the first edition copy showed that the book had been borrowed more than a century ago, on January 30, 1889. Investigations have found that the book had been in a private collection for 50 years before being handed to a local university, whose employees passed it back to the library... [more]

Source : Telegraph

Carbon dioxide buildup in atmosphere wouldn't spark abrupt climate change

2011-06-22T02:01:00.003+02:00

New research lends support to evidence from numerous recent studies that suggest abrupt climate change appears to be the result of alterations in ocean circulation uniquely associated with ice ages. There might be other mechanisms by which greenhouse gases may cause an abrupt climate change, but we know of no such mechanism from the geological record... [more]
Source : University of Washington

Water’s surface is not totally wet

2011-06-09T10:18:00.003+02:00

A new study narrows the boundary to just one quarter of water molecules in the uppermost layer - those that happen to have one hydrogen atom in water and the other vibrating freely above. Air and water meet over most of the earth’s surface, but exactly where one ends and the other begins turns out to be a surprisingly subtle question... [more]
Source : University of Southern California

Global Warming Stimulate Capacity of Trees to Store Carbon

2011-05-31T17:34:00.005+02:00

For the first time in a field experiment, that warmer temperatures stimulate the gain of carbon stored in trees as woody tissue, partially offsetting the soil carbon loss to the atmosphere. The carbon gains in trees, the scientists found, is due to more nitrogen being made available to the trees with warmer soil... [more]

Source : Marine Biological Laboratory

Human brain’s cells astrocytes cultivated in lab dish

2011-05-24T16:59:00.002+02:00

Long considered to be little more than putty in the brain and spinal cord, the star-shaped astrocyte has found new respect among neuroscientists who have begun to recognize its many functions in the brain, not to mention its role in a range of disorders of the central nervous system... [more]

Source : University of Wisconsin-Madison

Mathematical technique to detect trees on extrasolar planets

2011-05-22T07:11:00.002+02:00

In the search for life on other planets, scientists are looking beyond single-celled organisms and are developing techniques that would help them detect multicellular life, when observing planets outside the solar system, scientists would be able to identify a planet with forests by the characteristics of the light that it reflects, even if it looks like just a dot in the viewing lens... [more]
Source : Astrobiology Magazine

When pain disappear depression and anxiety too disappears in the brain

2011-05-20T10:54:00.002+02:00

It likely comes as no surprise that low back pain is the most common form of chronic pain among adults. Lesser known is the fact that those with chronic pain also experience cognitive impairments and reduced gray matter in parts of the brain associated with pain processing and the emotional components of pain, like depression and anxiety... [more]

Source : McGill University

Sleep Deprivation Affects Memory With Increased Levels Of Adenosine

2011-05-18T17:23:00.003+02:00

Researchers have found the part of the brain and the neurochemical basis for sleep deprivation’s effects on memory. For a long time, researchers have known that sleep deprivation results in increased levels of adenosine in the brain, and has this effect from fruit flies to mice to humans. There is accumulating evidence that this adenosine is really the source of a number of the deficits and impact of sleep deprivation, including memory loss and attention deficits. One thing that underscores that evidence is that caffeine is a drug that blocks the effects of adenosine... [more]
Source : University of Pennsylvania

The iron in melting Antarctic icebergs fertilize ocean

2011-05-17T12:26:00.002+02:00

Icebergs calving off of Antarctica are shedding substantial iron — the equivalent of a growth-boosting vitamin — into waters starved of the mineral, a new set of studies demonstrates. This iron is fertilizing the growth of microscopic plants and algae, transforming the waters adjacent to ice floes into teeming communities of everything from tiny shrimplike krill to fish, birds and sometimes mammals... [more]
Source : Science News

Sunlight turns jets pollute into toxic particles

2011-05-12T06:16:00.000+02:00

In the first on-tarmac measurements of their kind, researchers have shown that oil droplets spewed by idling jet engines can turn into particles tiny enough to readily penetrate the lungs and brain. As pollution from cars, trucks and most smokestacks has fallen, airport emissions have tended to climb... [more]

Source : Science News

Shortening school skirts stir debate in South Korea

2011-05-11T17:07:00.003+02:00

A row over how to respond to ever-shortening school skirts is brewing in South Korea. In one survey, quoted in a local paper, school hemlines have reportedly risen 10-15cm in the last decade... [more]

Source : BBC

Hydrogen sulphide as erectile dysfunction impotence treatments

2011-05-10T17:28:00.003+02:00

Researchers have discovered that a liquified form of hydrogen sulphide, the gas with the smell of rotten eggs, could help men with erectile dysfunction — it might even prove an alternative to the popular impotence drug Viagra... [more]

Source : Daily Mail

Synthetic Cow Blood Saved A Woman's Life

2011-05-06T04:27:00.003+02:00

Professor Mark Fitzgerald, faced with losing a patient who was unable to accept human blood transfusions due to religious beliefs had to get a blood substitute from the United States... [more]

Source : ABC Melbourne

Seeing Overweight People Can Thwart Diet

2011-05-06T04:22:00.002+02:00

Seeing overweight people can cause you to choose unhealthy foods and to eat more of them unless you consciously focus on your health goals, according to new research... [more]

Source : MSN

Elizabeth Blackburn a commercial genetic testing biological age

2011-05-05T20:07:00.004+02:00

Telomere Nobelist: Selling a 'biological age' test. Elizabeth Blackburn is launching a commercial genetic test that measures DNA markers of ageing... [more]

Source : New Scientist

Primordial Black Holes Pre-Date The Big Bang

2011-05-05T03:26:00.002+02:00

If the Universe expands and contracts in cycles of Big Bangs and Crunches, some black holes may survive from one era to the next, according to a new analysis, primordial black holes that cosmologists think must have formed in a different way. These are essentially leftovers from the hugely dense ball of stuff from which the universe expanded... [more]

Source : Technology Review

Cocaine leave similar mark on brain as nicotine

2011-05-04T06:50:00.003+02:00

Effects of nicotine upon brain regions involved in addiction mirror those of cocaine, according to new neuroscience research. A single 15-minute exposure to nicotine caused a long-term increase in the excitability of neurons involved in reward... [more]

Source : e Science News

Paper Predicting in 2009 Had Calculated That 81% Chance Osama Was in Abbottabad

2011-05-03T06:54:00.005+02:00

Could Osama bin Laden have been found faster if the CIA had followed the advice of ecosystem geographers from the University of California, Los Angeles? Probably not, but the predictions of UCLA geographer Thomas Gillespie, who, along with colleague John Agnew and a class of undergraduates, authored a 2009 paper predicting the terrorist’s whereabouts, were none too shabby. According to a probabilistic model they created, there was an 80.9% chance that bin Laden was hiding out in Abbottabad, Pakistan... [more] & [more]
Source : Science Aaas & The News Pointer

Changes in sleep duration in middle aged adults affect cognitive function in later life

2011-05-01T21:38:00.003+02:00

A study describes how changes in sleep that occur over a five-year period in late middle age affect cognitive function in later life. The findings suggest that women and men who begin sleeping more or less than 6 to 8 hours per night are subject to an accelerated cognitive decline that is equivalent to four to seven years of aging... [more]

Source : Medicalxpress

Bursts of sleep among infants associated with growth spurts in body length

2011-05-01T19:35:00.004+02:00

A study is the first to show that increased bursts of sleep among infants are significantly associated with growth spurts in body length. The results demonstrate empirically that growth spurts not only occur during sleep but are significantly influenced by sleep... [more] & [more] & [more]

Source : American academy of sleep medicine & Healthday & Medical xpress

Coca production in Colombia leads to deforestation thanks to U.S. drug use

2011-04-30T09:33:00.003+02:00

A recent study shows the linkage between the illegal production of coca and the continuing destruction of Colombia's rainforest. New plots of coca between 2002 and 2007 accounted for the direct destruction of 890 square kilometers of rainforest. That's roughly 6 percent of total rainforest lost in that period, which totaled to 14,000 square kilometers, or an area slightly larger than Jamaica... [more]
Source : Scientific American

There is a higher risk of unfaithfulness in people in positions of power including women

2011-04-29T12:38:00.003+02:00

It is a commonly accepted notion that men simply are more likely to cheat than women. However, study looks at the role that power, rather than gender, plays in infidelity. People often assume that powerful men may be more likely to cheat because they have risk-taking personalities or because of distance, such as frequent business trips that many powerful people go on... [more]

Source : Aps