Phones are terrific today. They can play games and watch videos and check email - they are just terrible at making calls.

And during a natural disaster, when too many people take to their mobile phones at once, cellular networks easily overload.   Mai Hassan, a PhD student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of British Columbia, has developed a solution to ensure that calls don't get dropped and texts make it to their destination.

Hassan found a way to opportunistically use television and radio channels to transmit cellular signals when systems are pushed beyond capacity.

It seems nowadays that makers (1) like to carry spare electronic parts around in a mint tin. Maybe I’m just Macgyver-old-school and prefer the challenge of getting along with just duct tape and a Leatherman Juice (OK, it is indeed an upgrade from Angus' Swiss Army Knife).

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Thermonuclear fusion can be achieved through a controlled reaction between two light variants of hydrogen, called deuterium and tritium - that sounds simple enough but improving the ignition stage of fusion reaction isn't trivial.

Theoretical calculations described in a paper published in EPJ D involve increasing the uniformity of irradiation using high-power laser beams on the external shell of a spherical capsule containing a mix of deuterium and tritium. 

The president Fernando Ferroni sent today an open, touching message to the personnel of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics, the Italian research organization he directs. The INFN contributed to the discovery of the Higgs boson by participating to the CMS and ATLAS experiments at CERN, providing funding and personnel -administrative staff, technicians, and researchers who are active members of the two big collaborations and who gave critical contributions to the discovery.

If you live in America and hadn't heard, the government is in a shutdown. We've had a full plate of political theater, with armed stand-offs at veteran's memorials and the National Zoo's Panda Cam going dark, presumably to convince us that government is funded on a daily basis - except for all those exempt and 'essential' employees, which number in the millions.

If you are asking, no, science is not considered essential to either party, that is why 97% of NASA is on vacation during this budget posturing.

Kissing helps us size up potential partners and, once in a relationship, may be a way of getting a partner to stick around, according to psychologists in a new paper.

The scholars set up an online questionnaire in which over 900 adults answered questions about the importance of kissing in both short-term and long-term relationships. 

The survey responses were that women rated kissing as generally more important in relationships than men. Furthermore, men and women who rated themselves as being attractive, or who tended to have more short-term relationships and casual encounters, also rated kissing as being more important.

Research using DNA to map the history of human migration is helping unravel the timing and source of human settlement in Central Europe.

One of the great debates in archaeological research for the past century has been the degree to which cultures or people move. When you see a pronounced cultural shift in the archaeological record, for instance, is it because of a new people appearing on the scene, or is it simply the diffusion of a new culture? This new Genographic study shows definitively that, for Germany over a four-millennia-long time span from 5500 B.C. to 1500 B.C., it was people who were on the move, carrying their genes with them.

Children who stutter have less grey matter in key regions of the brain responsible for speech production than children who do not stutter, according to brain scans of 28 children ranging from five to 12 years old. Half the children were diagnosed with stuttering; the other half served as a control. 

Results showed that the inferior frontal gyrus region of the brain develops abnormally in children who stutter. This is important because that part of the brain is thought to control articulatory coding—taking information our brain understands about language and sounds and coding it into speech movements.

One of the more controversial issues from the recent first part of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) is the failure of global climate models to predict a hiatus in warming of global surface temperatures since 1998.

Several ideas have been put forward to explain this hiatus, including what the IPCC refers to as 'unpredictable climate variability' that is associated with large-scale circulation regimes in the atmosphere and ocean.

If you talk to social scientists, egoism and narcissism appear are on the rise while empathy is on the decline.

In recent years, the ability to put ourselves in other people's shoes has been deemed extremely important for our coexistence - nuclear bombs will do that to a society -  but our own feelings can distort our capacity for empathy, according to a new paper. Emotionally driven egocentricity is recognized and corrected by the brain, they say, but when the right supramarginal gyrus doesn't function properly or when we have to make particularly quick decisions, our empathy is severely limited.