What causes segregation? No one knows. No one even knows where the line is. For example, in science classes, there is worry that if there are not enough people 'like' an individual, they will feel intimidated and excluded. But when there are lots of people like an individual, they tend to self-segregate into groups based on gender and ethnicity.

On the city-wide level, environmentalists advocate very dense housing because it has lower strain on the land, but a new study in PNAS finds that dense cities lead to more segregation, even in previously integrated neighborhoods. Racially and economically mixed cities are more likely to stay integrated if the density of households stays low.

Nature Publishing Group has announced that Nature Communications will only accept open access research submissions starting October 20th 2014.

This is a big win for open access.  The 2013 Impact Factor for Nature Communications is 10.742, according to the 2013 Journal Citation Reports® Science Edition (Thomson Reuters, 2014). When it launched in 2010 it was a hybrid journal, publishing both open access and subscription content, but they now get over 1500 submissions every month so open access is viable.

Khabarovsk Krai, a territory occupying the coastline of the Sea of Okhotsk, is on fire. Dozens of red hotspots, accompanied by plumes of smoke mark active fires. The smoke, which appears mostly white or grey, blows to the east towards the Sea of Okhotsk.

Taiga and tundra are found in the north of this area, swampy forest inhabit the central depression, and deciduous forests are the natural vegetation in the south.

Electrical engineering researchers have developed a unique nanoscale device that demonstrates mechanical transportation of light.

The nanoscale device that can capture, measure and transport fundamental particles of light - photons. The tiny device is just 0.7 micrometers by 50 micrometer (about .00007 by .005 centimeters) and works almost like a seesaw. On each side of the "seesaw benches," researchers etched an array of holes, called photonic crystal cavities. These cavities capture photons that streamed from a nearby source. 

Gravitational waves are phenomena predicted by Einstein's theory of General Relativity but no one has ever observed them and their discovery would have profound implications for the study of the Universe.

Last March, the team behind the BICEP2 project made a ground-breaking announcement: the Antarctic observatory had detected a signal referable to gravitational waves. The study said they excluded possible contaminants - other sources that could have generated the same signal - and that the observation was valid.

Preliminary results from a recent study show that a blood test, when used in psychiatric patients experiencing symptoms that are considered to be indicators of a high risk for psychosis, identifies those who later went on to develop psychosis. 

It may lead to accurate diagnosis of people who are experiencing the earliest stages of psychosis. Psychosis includes hallucinations or delusions that define the development of severe mental disorders such as schizophrenia. Schizophrenia emerges in late adolescence and early adulthood and affects about 1 in every 100 people. In severe cases, the impact on a young person can be a life compromised, and the burden on family members can be almost as severe.