Astronomers have discovered the exact location and makeup of a pair of supermassive black holes at the center of a collision of two galaxies more than 300 million light years away.

Using adaptive optics (AO), which clear the blurring effects of turbulence in the Earth's atmosphere, Livermore scientists observed that the two black holes formed at the center of a rotating disk of stars in the galaxy merger known as NGC 6240 and are surrounded by a cloud of young star clusters.

Children who are hyperactive tend to do worse academically than their peers who are not hyperactive. Although the relationship between such behaviors as overactivity, impulsivity, and inattentiveness in children and poor achievement in math, reading, language, and other areas has been well documented, little is known about the reasons for this link. New research shows that the tie may be due to genetic influences.

Most people don’t think much about the inner workings of LEDs, or light-emitting diodes, which illuminate today’s plasma TV screens and cell phones, but making these LEDs more efficient, cheaper and higher quality is the obsession that occupies the daily thoughts of materials science and engineering professor Yang Yang and his graduate researcher Jinsong Huang.

Yang and Huang have recently achieved the highest lumens per watt ever recorded for a red phosphorescent LED using a new combination of plastic, or polymer, infused liquid — and they did it at half the current cost. Yang and Huang’s latest record will be presented at the Society for Information Display 2007 conference in Long Beach, Calif., from May 20 through 25.

By the time they are adults, men and women have distinctive attitudes about the roles women should play in society. But little is known about how these views develop. The first longitudinal study to track young people's attitudes toward gender found that no single course of gender attitude development contributed to adult attitudes, but rather that attitudes develop as a result of such factors as gender, birth order, gender of sibling, and parents' influences.

The findings are published in the May/June 2007 issue of the journal Child Development. The study was conducted by researchers at Pennsylvania State University and Purdue University.

The researchers looked at 201 two-parent, predominantly white working and middle-class families with children ages 7 to 19.

Scientists have found evidence that the cox-2 inhibitor celecoxib, a common pain reliever used to treat arthritis, may offer a new way to reduce the risk of the most common cause of brain damage in babies born prematurely.

The work involves shoring up blood vessels in a part of the brain that in premature infants is extremely fragile and vulnerable to dangerous bleeding, which affects an estimated 12,000 children a year, leaving many permanently affected by cerebral palsy, mental retardation, and seizures.

Most animals appear symmetrical at first glance, but we're full of internal lop-sidedness. From the hand used to pick up a pencil or throw a baseball, to where language is generated in the brain, to the orientation of our internal organs, humans are a glut of asymmetries. Worms aren't so different: The roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans has nerves on its left and right sides that perform different functions. Like handedness, the determination of which nerves develop on which side seems random from worm to worm.