A team of U.S. and Japanese scientists has shown for the first time that the spectroscopic "fingerprint" of high-temperature superconductivity remains intact well above the super chilly temperatures at which these materials carry current with no resistance. This confirms that certain conditions necessary for superconductivity exist at the warmer temperatures that would make these materia...

Does an exciting but controversial new model of quantum gravity reproduce Einstein`s theory of general relativity? Scientists at Texas A&M University in the US explore this question in a paper appearing in Physical Review Letters and highlighted with a Viewpoint in the August 24th issue of Physics. "If it ain`t broke, don`t fix it," sums up fairly well how many scientists have viewed...

A team of scientists has found a new planet which orbits the wrong way around its host star. The planet, named WASP-17, and orbiting a star 1000 light years away, was found by the UK`s WASP project in collaboration with Geneva Observatory. The discovery, which casts new light on how planetary systems form and evolve, is being announced August 12 in a paper submitted to Astrophysical Journal. Since...

People with psoriasis – an often distressing dermatological condition that causes lesions and red scaly patches on the skin – are less likely to react to looks of disgust by others than people without the condition, new research has found. University of Manchester scientists used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans to compare the brains of 26 men, half of whom had chronic psoriasis....

Entomologists at the University of California, Riverside working on fruit flies in the lab have discovered a novel class of compounds that could pave the way for developing inexpensive and safe mosquito repellents for combating West Nile virus and other deadly tropical diseases. When fruit flies undergo stress, they emit carbon dioxide (CO2) that serves as a warning to other fruit flies that dange...

Healthy middle-aged women with feelings of hopelessness appear to experience thickening of the neck arteries, which can be a precursor to stroke, according to new research out of the University of Minnesota Medical School. The study, published online August 27 in Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association, found that hopelessness — negative thinking and feelings of uselessness —...

The molecular mechanisms of tungstate activity in diabetes have been uncovered. Researchers have identified the pathways through which sodium tungstate improves pancreatic function and beta cell proliferation. A team led by Professor Ramon Gomis at the Hospital Clinic de Barcelona, Spain, studied the effects of sodium tungstate on pancreatic gene expression in a rat model of diabetes, in order to ...

The ability to envisage the future may be closer than you would think. A recent paper by Sean Hammond and Karl Niklas in the August 2009 issue of the American Journal of Botany presents an algorithm that may be used to predict the future dynamics of plant communities, an increasingly interesting area of study as significant environmental changes, such as global climate change and invasive species,...

A new study reveals that when it comes to pain control, the "placebo effect" involves evolutionarily old pain control pathways in the human brainstem, the part of the brain that is continuous with the spinal cord. The research, published by Cell Press in the August 27th issue of the journal Neuron, provides fascinating mechanistic insight into how and why simply expecting that a treatmen...

It can strike anyone: rheumatism occurs just as often as diabetes, arteriosclerosis and cancer combined. Approximately one percent of the population is stricken with the rheumatoid arthritis. Mostly it begins with initial inflammation in the finger joints. If it is discovered in time and a treatment is begun, the chances are good that the dreaded joint damage can be averted. Now scientists at the ...