The ice sheet on West Antarctica just got a little older - 20 million years or so.

The findings indicate that ice sheets first grew on the West Antarctic subcontinent at the start of a global transition from warm greenhouse conditions to a cool icehouse climate 34 million years ago. Previous computer simulations were unable to produce the amount of ice that geological records suggest existed at that time because neighboring East Antarctica alone could not support it.

The universe may be constructed in a completely different way than models of today predict. The most widely used model today cannot explain everything in the universe, and therefore there is a need to explore the parts of nature which the model cannot explain.

This research field, new physics, is out to turn our understanding of the universe upside down and the authors of a new paper say they have succeeded in creating a new method that can make it easier to search for new physics in the universe. The method is a scalesetting procedure and it fills out some empty, but very important, holes in the theories, models and simulations, which form the basis for particle physics today. 

Zoological methods of studying behavior patterns in animals have led to insights on people with serious mental disorders.

Prof. David Eilam of
Tel Aviv University
's Zoology Department recorded patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder and "schizo-OCD", which combines symptoms of schizophrenia and OCD, as they performed basic tasks. By analyzing the patients' movements, they were able to identify similarities and differences between two frequently confused disorders.

The research represents a step toward resolving a longstanding question about the nature of schizo-OCD: Is it a combination of OCD and schizophrenia, or a variation of just one of the disorders?

Astronomers have explored more than 100 planetary nebulae in the central bulge of our galaxy and found that butterfly-shaped members of this cosmic family tend to be mysteriously aligned — a surprising result given their different histories and varied properties.

The final stages of life for a star like our Sun result in the star puffing its outer layers out into the surrounding space, forming objects known as planetary nebulae in a wide range of beautiful and striking shapes. One type of such nebulae, known as bipolar planetary nebulae, create ghostly hourglass or butterfly shapes around their parent stars.

Video games have beem widely available to the home market for 40 years, which means there have been 40 years of concern about what impact, negative or positive, they may have.

Soon after the first video games such as Pong and Space Invaders hit the market in the 1970s, psychologists and neuroscientists began to investigate whether playing video games might be beneficial to the brain.  Proponents speak of the neuroscience benefit of time-pressured deployment, flexible allocation, of attention as well as precise bi-manual movements while detractors worry about the time spent away from doing other things and that video games may inspire violent behavior. 

Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers have developed a new oxygen “sponge” that can easily absorb or shed oxygen atoms at low temperatures.  Materials containing atoms that can switch back and forth between multiple oxidation states  are very rare in nature but useful in devices such as rechargeable batteries, sensors, gas converters and fuel cells.