COLUMBUS, Ohio - Are employees more likely to help co-workers above them or beneath them in the corporate pecking order?

A new study suggests that may be the wrong question to ask. Researchers found that workers are most likely to help colleagues who are moderately distant from themselves in status -- both above and below them.

The results offer a new way to think about how status affects workplace relationships, said Robert Lount, co-author of the study and an associate professor of management and human resources at The Ohio State University's Fisher College of Business.

Research led by Johns Hopkins University scientists has found new persuasive evidence that could help solve a longstanding mystery in astrophysics: Why did the pace of star formation in the universe slow down some 11 billion years ago?

The conflict between science and religion may have its origins in the structure of our brains, researchers at Case Western Reserve University and Babson College have found.

Clashes between the use of faith vs. scientific evidence to explain the world around us dates back centuries and is perhaps most visible today in the arguments between evolution and creationism.

To believe in a supernatural god or universal spirit, people appear to suppress the brain network used for analytical thinking and engage the empathetic network, the scientists say. When thinking analytically about the physical world, people appear to do the opposite.

Premature birth is a harsh change of environment for a baby. Until birth, the baby is confined to the mother's womb, surrounded by soft lighting and filtered noise. When infants are born, they are attacked by several visual, sound, and tactile stimulations. These stimulations thus constitute unpleasant factors for them. Their impact has not been studied in depth yet. Researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), in collaboration with the neonatal team of the Grenoble university hospital (CHU), and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) examined the consequences of noise on the sensory abilities of premature babies. For the first time, this enabled the researchers to reveal the effect of a negative stimulus on the sensory functions of newborns.

A strange sensation, but familiar to anyone who has ever been given local anaesthesia and watched while a doctor operated on their leg or arm: in that moment, your own body part seems foreign, as if it doesn't belong to your body. One reason for this is that the brain still knows which position the limb occupied before the local anaesthetic took effect. As soon as it wears off, the spooky sensation disappears.

Research A new scientific study shows that long-term recreational football training produces a number of marked improvements in health profile for 63-75 year old untrained men -- including a reduced risk of developing cardiovascular diseases and diabetes.
The research project was carried out at the Copenhagen Centre for Team Sport and Health at Copenhagen University, and the findings have just been published in the international journal PLOS ONE.

The study shows that regular participation in recreational football improved the health, physical fitness and muscle function of the 63-75 year old men in the study, and significantly reduced body weight.

Both short-term and long-term effects

When a hail storm moved through Fort Worth, Texas on May 5, 1995, it battered the highly populated area with hail up to 4 inches in diameter and struck a local outdoor festival known as the Fort Worth Mayfest.

The Mayfest storm was one of the costliest hailstorms in U.S history, causing more than $2 billion in damage and injuring at least 100 people.

Scientists know that storms with a rotating updraft on their southwestern sides -- which are particularly common in the spring on the U.S. southern plains -- are associated with the biggest, most severe tornadoes and also produce a lot of large hail. However, clear ideas on how they form and how to predict these events in advance have proven elusive.

Whether taking photos recreationally or professionally, photographers understandably want their snapshots to appear sharp and clear. Image clarity is dependent on exposure time, or the amount of time that a camera's sensor is exposed to light while a photograph is being taken. During this period, the shutter opens and the camera counts the number of photons emitted by the subject.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- With record-breaking speeds for fiber-optic data transmission, University of Illinois engineers have paved a fast lane on the information superhighway -- creating on-ramps for big data in the process.

Graduate researcher Michael Liu will present the research team's developments in oxide-VCSEL technology, which underpins fiber-optic communications systems, at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exposition today in Anaheim, California. The research team was led by electrical and computer engineering professor Milton Feng -- who will be in attendance at the conference -- and also included professor emeritus Nick Holonyak Jr. and graduate researcher Curtis Wang.