Like crowds of people, microscopic particles can act together under the right conditions. By exposing crowd behavior at the atomic scale, scientists discover new states and properties of matter. Now, ultrafast lasers have revealed a previously unseen type of collective electronic behavior in semiconductors, which may help in the design of optoelectronic devices.

Design of optoelectronic devices, like the semiconductor diode lasers used in telecommunications, currently involves a lot of trial and error. A designer trying to use basic theory to calculate the characteristics of a new diode laser will be off by a significant amount because of subtle interactions in the semiconductor that could not be detected until recently.

A role for prion proteins, the much debated agents of mad cow disease and vCJD, has been identified. It appears that the normal prions produced by the body help to prevent the plaques that build up in the brain to cause Alzheimer’s disease. The possible function for the mysterious proteins was discovered by a team of scientists led by Medical Research Council funded scientist Professor Nigel Hooper of the University of Leeds.

Alzheimer’s and diseases like variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease follow similar patterns of disease progression and in some forms of prion disease share genetic features. These parallels prompted Professor Hooper’s team to look for a link between the different conditions. They found an apparent role for normal prion proteins in preventing Alzheimer’s disease.

A virus that has been specifically designed by scientists to be safe to normal tissue but deadly to cancer is showing early promise in a preliminary study, researchers said today at the ESMO Conference Lugano (ECLU), Switzerland, 5-8 July 2007.

The virus, called NV1020, is a type of herpes simplex virus modified so that it selectively replicates in virus cells, killing them in the process.

In some regions of Central Europe, salad dressing is made with pumpkin seed oil, which has a strong characteristic nutty flavor and striking color properties - in the bottle it appears red, but it looks green in a salad dressing.

Samo and Marko Kreft's paper examines the remarkable two-tone (or dichromatic) color of pumpkin seed oil, by the use of a combination of imaging and CIE (International Commission on Illumination) chromaticity coordinates. The paper also explains why human vision perceives substances like pumpkin seed oil as dichromatic or polychromatic (exhibiting a variety of colors).

Two phenomena explain the perceived shift in color of pumpkin seed oil from red to green:

First, the change in color is due to a change in oil layer thickness.

The Ugandan government wants to change the law to allow Mabira Forest Reserve, the 30,000 hectare rainforest in Uganda which has been protected since 1932, to be carved up and a quarter of it used for sugar cane production by huge firms, notably the Mehta Group, which has close ties to politicians within and outside the country.

The forest is home to nearly one third of Uganda's bird life.

A world leader in medical implants calls for a rethink in our approach to building medical implants.

Currently so-called biomaterials are chosen because they are reasonably successful at hiding from the body’s immune system, and are consequently not rejected. All the same, within a month of implanting them, the body isolates implants by wrapping them in a collagenous, avascular sac. Materials are considered to be ‘biocompatible’ if this sac is not too thick.

Salk Institute neurobiologists are beginning to tease apart the complex brain networks that enable humans and other higher mammals to fix our gaze on one object while independently directing attention to others - that pesky method mom used to always know you were doing something wrong when her back was turned.

In a study published in the July 5, 2007 issue of Neuron, the researchers report two classes of brain cells with distinct roles in visual attention, and highlight at least two mechanisms by which these cells mediate attention.

Mention "outsourcing" and people tend to think of fields like manufacturing or telemarketing; theoretical physics isn't even on the list.

Yet the scientists who develop theoretical predictions for high-energy particle physics experiments say "outsourcing" in their field has allowed the U.S. to lag behind in this area of high-profile, global science.

"This is the wrong kind of outsourcing," says Ulrich Baur, Ph.D., professor of physics in the University at Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences and a co-founder of the Large Hadron Collider-Theory Initiative.

Independent research, involving over 3 million Italians, conducted by Henley Management College and the University of Milan has concluded that the prescription costs for men over the age of 65 is significantly higher than it is for women.

The primary objective of this study was to make the first step in the modelling of pharmaceutical demand in Italy to improve the governance of prescribing funds.

The research found that the mean annual prescription cost per individual was similar for males (196.13 euro) and females (195.12euro). However after 65 years of age, the mean prescribing costs for males were significantly higher than females. On average, costs for a 75-year-old man would be 12 times the costs for a 25-34 year-old subject if male, 8 times if female.

Like the surface motif of a bubble bath, the spatial distribution of a magnetic field penetrating a superconductor can exhibit an intricate, foam-like structure. Ruslan Prozorov at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory has observed these mystifying, two-dimensional equilibrium patterns in lead samples when the material is in its superconducting state, below 7.2 Kelvin, or minus 446.71 degrees Fahrenheit.