Topological transport of light is the photonic analog of topological electron flow in certain semiconductors. In the electron case, the current flows around the edge of the material but not through the bulk. It is "topological" in that even if electrons encounter impurities in the material the ...

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have unexpectedly discovered the most distant galaxy that acts as a cosmic magnifying glass. Seen here as it looked 9.6 billion years ago, this monster elliptical galaxy breaks the previous record-holder by 200 million years. These "lensing" galaxies ...

One of the baffling electronic properties of the iron-based high-temperature superconductor barium iron nickel arsenide is that, at sufficiently low temperatures, it becomes a better conductor of electricity in some directions than in others. The odd behavior, which has been documented in a number ...

Schrödinger's cat is one of the famous examples of the weirdness of quantum mechanics   The thought puzzle is that you put a cat inside a box and make its life dependent on a random event, when does the cat die? When the random event occurs, or when you open the box?Obviously when the event ...

A trigeneration system fueled entirely by raw plant oils could have great potential for isolated homes and businesses operating outside grid systems. Combined Heat and Power units have been used by large businesses for many years, producing electricity from a generator, and running heating off ...

A comparison of Baltic Sea region amber with amber from Asia could be significant - rather than being found just in Mecklenburg, Poland or Belarus, European species have been found almost 10,000 kilometers away in Fushun, even though Europe and Asia were divided by the Strait of Turgay ...

One of the most promising aspects of a Science 2.0 future is not just being able to analyze trillions of data points or getting the public to help with biology, but making more accurate models using much larger data sets. Big data.This is not new in commercial physics software, where a Monte Carlo ...

As the climate warms and sea ice retreats, the North is changing. An ice-covered expanse now has a season of increasingly open water which is predicted to extend across the whole Arctic Ocean before the middle of this century. Storms thus have the potential to create Arctic swell – huge waves ...

This article was first published 31 July 2014 on Things We Don't Know. Reprinted here with permission.This bobtail squid is very surprised at the absence of squid gynaecologists! Image credit: NOAA OKEANOS Explorer ProgramI first saw squid pimples in 2006, on a research cruise in the Sea of ...

Researchers have been able to experimentally reproduce morphological changes in mice which have taken millions of years to occur. Through small and gradual modifications in the embryonic development of mice teeth, induced in the laboratory, they obtained teeth which morphologically are very ...

One of the most diverse families in the ocean today, marine bivalve mollusks - called Lucinidae or lucinids - originated more than 400 million years ago in the Silurian period, with adaptations and life habits like those of its modern members. About 500 lucinid species exist today, with by ...

Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by impaired social interaction, verbal and non-verbal communication, and by restricted and repetitive behaviors. Diagnosis is solely based on behavioral analysis, biological markers and neurological underpinnings remain unknown, but the search ...

A paper in The Journal of Clinical Investigation helps explain why brain tumors occur more often in males and frequently are more harmful than similar tumors in females. Glioblastomas, the most common malignant brain tumors, are diagnosed twice as often in males, who suffer greater cognitive impairments ...

Understanding eye diseases is tricky enough but knowing what causes them at the molecular level will help. University of Iowa researchers have created the most detailed map to date of a region of the human eye long associated with blinding diseases, such as age-related macular degeneration. The ...

Scholars at University Hospitals Rainbow Babies  &  Children's Hospital analyzed pediatric medical emergencies on flights worldwide between January 2010 - June 2013 and found 90 that percent of deaths occurred in children under the age of 2 - lap infants may be at greater risk for death ...

Resistance to artemisinin, the main drug to treat malaria, has become widespread throughout Southeast Asia.Resistance among the Plasmodium falciparum (P. falciparum) parasites that cause the disease is likely caused by a genetic mutation in the parasites, but a six-day course of artemisinin-based ...

New research has revealed psychogenic seizures which could be mistaken for epilepsy are linked to feelings of anxiety. The team of researchers devised a set of tests to determine whether there was a link between how people interpret and respond to anxiety, and incidences of psychogenic nonepileptic ...

Modern humans began the first steps to what we might call culture some 50,000 years ago, 150,000 years after appearing in the fossil record. What changed?A new paper in Current Anthropology argues that more feminine faces and gentler personalities were the result of less testosterone. People ...

The current government in Washington, D.C. may be dysfunctional but they still get together on some things. H.R. 5183, the Value-Based Insurance Design (VBID) for Better Care Act of 2014,could improve the health of patients with chronic illness while reducing what they spend on the medicines ...

An anthropological wave has taken place, first in Asia that has now spread worldwide - humans, the most social species on the planet, have begun to gather in groups and ignore each other while communicating wirelessly with people doing the same ignoring of real people elsewhere.The trend of sitting ...

The history of World War I - since there was no II then, it was simply The Great War - is well-known. Volumes have been written about why European monarchs, related to each other, nonetheless rolled "the iron dice" and sent millions of young men to their deaths. The technological and medical ...

If you read politics on Twitter, you would have recently seen that Republicans in the U.S. Congress are going to impeach President Obama if they get enough seats in November, so it is vital that Democrats win elections. Or you can read that living near a farm will give your child autism and ...

Security researchers at the Georgia Tech Information Security Center (GTISC) have discovered a way to jailbreak current generation Apple iOS devices (e.g., iPhones and iPads) running the latest iOS software. The jailbreak, which enables circumvention of Apple's closed platform, was discovered by ...

In the 1800s, mentally ill people were in jail. Then they were put in more humane mental hospitals. But then mental hospitals got vilified in mainstream news stories and horror movies and they were closed and now mentally ill people are back in jails, 10 times as many as are in mental health facilities ...