A recent study has shown that emissions in major cities caused by restaurants such as pizzerias and steakhouses using wood burners can be damaging to the urban environment.

The findings published in the journal Atmospheric Environment points out the underlining pollution causes of the Latin American city of Sao Paulo in Brazil. This work is a collaborative effort by ten leading air pollution experts from seven universities, led by the University of Surrey's Dr Prashant Kumar from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, under the umbrella of University Global Partnership Network (UGPN).

Warsaw, Poland, 17 June 2016 - A new study from the UK Centre for Substance Use Research, being presented today at the Global Forum on Nicotine, shows e-cigarettes are playing an important role in reducing the likelihood of young people smoking, in many cases acting as a 'roadblock' to combustible tobacco.

In detailed qualitative interviews with young people aged 16 to 25 across Scotland and England, the majority of participants viewed e-cigarettes as having reduced - not increased - the possibility of both themselves and other people smoking.

Diminishing a person's belief in free will leads to them feeling less like their true selves, according to recent research published in Social Psychological and Personality Science. In a pair of studies, researchers from Texas A&M University manipulated people's beliefs in free will to see how this would affect the subjects' sense of authenticity, their sense of self.

"Whether you agree that we have free will or that we are overpowered by social influence or other forms of determinism, the belief in free will has truly important consequences," says lead author Elizabeth Seto, a Graduate Student at the Department of Psychology at Texas A&M University.

An effective and less expensive tool for the inspection of food and drugs could soon be a reality. Scientists from the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society in Berlin have been working with national and international partners to develop a conceptually new source of terahertz radiation. The innovation makes it much easier to generate this radiation, which is well suited to the analysis of soft materials and could therefore be more widely used in the food and pharmaceutical industry in future.

A new paper in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology reviewed all mammal species known from the end of the Cretaceous period in North America and found that over 93 percent became extinct across the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) boundary, due to the same asteroid that killed the dinosaurs in the Cretaceous period 66 million years ago.

That's significantly more than previously thought - but mammals also recovered far more quickly than previously though.  

Dear class of 2016,

Finishing school can be a daunting experience but you are young, bright and have your future ahead of you — easy for me to say, you might think.

I could fill a book with the things I wish I’d known when I left school – how to iron, how to put up a shelf, how invaluable learning languages is. Though the biggest one is how everyone is in the same boat, and how no one really knows what they want to do when they leave school.

So, with this in mind, let me impart some of my age old wisdom onto your young shoulders. Here are some of the most important life lessons I wish somebody had taught me before the final school bell rang.

Celiac disease is a rare immune-based condition brought on by the consumption of gluten in genetically susceptible patients. In recent years a larger number of people have stated they are gluten sensitive or even celiac despite lack of a diagnosis, and many dismissed that as the nocebo effect - people who give up something harmless and feel better, the opposite of people who take something harmless and feel better, a placebo. They argued that people who were embracing it because of pop culture books on wheat.

I am happy to announce here that a session on "Statistical Methods for Physics Analysis in the XXI Century" will take place at the "Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum" conference, which will be held in Thessaloniki on August 28th to September 3rd this year. I have already mentioned this a few weeks ago, but now I can release a tentative schedule of the two afternoons devoted to the topic.

When optimizing in multi-dimensional parameter spaces, local maximums are not as much of a problem as being misguided by maximums that are constrained on a lower dimensional subspace. Therefore, so called ‘walk-in’ methods are necessary. They must explore all directions of the high dimensional space. Apart from such details, we are more interested in complexity as such in order to allow complex reactions and properties/behaviors in the first place (before optimizing), and to further research how proxy-measures of complexity compare to performance.

In the 1950s, thalidomide (Contergan) was prescribed as a sedative drug to pregnant women, resulting in a great number of infants with serious malformations. Up to now, the reasons for these disastrous birth defects have remained unclear. Researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have at last identified the molecular mechanism of thalidomide. Their findings are highly relevant to current cancer therapies, as related substances are essential components of modern cancer treatment regimens.