The DZERO collaboration has released last week the result of their search for the rare decay of B_s mesons into muon pairs, based on the full statistics of proton-antiproton collisions acquired during Run II - a total of 10.4 inverse femtobarns of integrated luminosity.

We love our modern gadgets, so we sometimes forget we still have an energy problem our Founding Fathers faced - and it impacts everything from the usability of solar power to the uptake of electric cars also.

The remains of a calcified ovarian teratoma in the pelvis of the skeleton of a woman from the Roman era confirms the presence in antiquity of this type of tumor - formed by the remains of tissues or organs, which are difficult to locate during the examination of ancient remains.

Inside the small round mass, four teeth and a small piece of bone were found.

 

It's easy to blame weather forecasting when the forecast says one thing and ends up being another, but Brigham Young University mechanical engineering professor Julie Crockett says it may not be the fault of the meteorologists. 

According to Crockett, forecasters make mistakes because the models they use for predicting weather can't accurately track highly influential elements called internal waves.

Atmospheric internal waves are waves that propagate between layers of low-density and high-density air. Although hard to describe, almost everyone has seen or felt these waves. Cloud patterns made up of repeating lines are the result of internal waves, and airplane turbulence happens when internal waves run into each other and break.

Concern that many animals are becoming extinct before scientists even have time to identify them has led to some exaggeration, according to Griffith University researcher Professor Nigel Stork.

A number of misconceptions have fueled these fears, Stork said, and there is no evidence that extinction rates are as high as some have feared.

"Surprisingly, few species have gone extinct, to our knowledge. Of course, there will have been some species which have disappeared without being recorded, but not many we think," Professor Stork said.

Professor Stork said part of the problem is that there is an inflated sense of just how many animals exist and therefore how big the task to record them.

Epigenetics is a nascent, exciting field and due to its broad scope, it is used to rationalize the 'it might be so' potential of the mundane (evolutionary psychology) to the silly (social psychology) but some new research reveals a potential way for how parents' experiences could be passed to their offspring's genes. 

Epigenetics is a system that turns our genes on and off. The process works by chemical tags, known as epigenetic marks, attaching to DNA and telling a cell to either use or ignore a particular gene. The most common epigenetic mark is a methyl group. When these groups fasten to DNA through a process called methylation they block the attachment of proteins which normally turn the genes on. As a result, the gene is turned off.

Northwestern University graduate student Jonathan Barnes and colleagues are the first to permanently interlock two identical tetracationic rings that normally are repelled by each other.

Some experts had said it couldn't be done. 

On the surface, the rings hate each other because each carries four positive charges (making them tetracationic). But they discovered that by introducing radicals (unpaired electrons) onto the scene, the researchers could create a love-hate relationship in which love triumphs.

Unpaired electrons want to pair up and be stable, and it turns out the attraction of one ring's single electrons to the other ring's single electrons is stronger than the repelling forces.

You know how your grandfather could tell a storm was coming by an ache in his knee? University of Cincinnati researchers say lightning may affect the onset of headache and migraines.

Geoffrey Martin, fourth-year medical student, and his father Vincent Martin, MD, professor in the division of general internal medicine, led the study which showed that there was a 31 percent increased risk of headache and 28 percent increased risk of migraine for chronic headache sufferers on days lighting struck within 25 miles of study participant's homes.

In addition, new-onset headache and migraine increased by 24 percent and 23 percent in participants.

Fossilized teeth have led to identification of at least 23 species of small meat-eating dinosaurs that roamed western Canada and the United States between 85 and 65 million years ago, a large increase from the 7 species of small two-legged meat-eating dinosaurs from the North American west that had previously been identified.

The researchers examined a massive dataset of fossil teeth that included samples from members of the families to which Velociraptor and Troodon (possibly the brainiest dinosaur) belong.