Despite the shutdown of the Fermilab Tevatron collider, two years ago, and the subsequent disassembling of the glorious CDF detector, the CDF Collaboration continues to produce excellent physics results using the large bounty of data they have accumulated in the course of the past 10 years.

Today you can find in the Cornell arxiv a new paper by CDF, which describes a new very interesting measurement of a property of the top quark - the particle discovered at Fermilab in 1995, the heaviest known elementary particle we know. The property measured is the lifetime of top quarks.

A new hypothesis by computational physicists states that "zombie vortices" help lead to the birth of a new star.

They even find a way to make it about angular momentum, saying that variations in gas density lead to instability, which then generates the whirlpool-like vortices needed for stars to form.

Astronomers accept that in the first steps of a new star's birth, dense clouds of gas collapse into clumps that, with the aid of angular momentum, spin into one or more Frisbee-like disks where a protostar starts to form. But for the protostar to grow bigger, the spinning disk needs to lose some of its angular momentum so that the gas can slow down and spiral inward onto the protostar. Once the protostar gains enough mass, it can kick off nuclear fusion.

 Around the world, more than two billion tons of trash is generated each year. America leads the world in accurate reporting of trash levels and therefore has the distinction of throwing away more than any other country. Understanding why consumers throw recyclable products into the garbage instead of recycling them could help companies and public policy makers find novel ways to encourage consumers to step up their recycling efforts. 

A paper in the Journal of Consumer Research examines recycling habits and finds that consumers are more likely to toss a dented can or a chopped-up piece of paper into the trash than to recycle it.

A new case study outlines the instance of a 60-year-old woman who suddenly began hearing music, as if a radio were playing at the back of her head.

She couldn't identify the music but when she hummed or sang the tunes, her husband was able to recognize them. She didn't know the songs but she was hallucinating music familiar to people around her. 

Neurologists Danilo Vitorovic and José Biller of Loyola University Medical Center say the case raises "intriguing questions regarding memory, forgetting and access to lost memories."

It's best not to think too much about this before your next flight but, even while on the ground,aircraft landing gear can have shimmy oscillations during taxiing, takeoff, and landing.

Reducing the expression of a pair of proteins known as NEETs, NAF-1 and mitoNEET, significantly reduced cancer cell proliferation and breast cancer tumor size, according to a new paper.

NEET proteins transport iron molecules or iron sulfur clusters inside cells. The proteins naturally adhere to the outer surface of the mitochondria, the "power plant" that supplies cells with chemical energy. Mitochondria also play a role in a cell's life cycle, including its death.

The new research stemmed from a recent CTBP study of the shape and functions of one of the proteins, mitoNEET. The other protein, NAF-1, is closely related to mitoNEET.

A technique from Case Western Reserve University seeks to address two challenges inherent in brain-implantation technology; gaging the property changes that occur during implantation and measuring on a micro-scale. 

The authors seek to make some progress down the bioengineering path — crafting a device that can withstand the physiological conditions in the brain for the long-term. 

9 ancient Egyptian iron beads which were carefully hammered into thin sheets before being rolled into tubes over 5,000 years ago were actually hammered from pieces of meteorites and not iron ore. 

The objects trace their origins to outer space and predate the emergence of iron smelting by two millennia.

The beads were originally strung into a necklace together with other exotic minerals such as gold and gemstones, revealing the high value of this exotic material in ancient times, say the scholars in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

A new paper says that a Chinese herbal medicine called Ji-Sui-Kang (JSK), given systemically for three weeks after injury in rats, improved locomotor function, reduced tissue damage, and preserved the structure of neural cells compared to control rats. 

Their data also claim that Ji-Sui-Kang may first act to reduce inflammation and cell apoptosis and death, and boost local oxygen supply while, later on, it appears to restore function and promote tissue regeneration. The researchers did the study because while Chinese herbal medicines have been used for a variety of ailments, the rationale is based more on anecdotal evidence than controlled experiments.

Researchers have unearthed the remains of massive ancient fortifications built around an Iron-Age Assyrian harbor in the contemporary Israeli coastal city of Ashdod, just south of Tel Aviv.

At the heart of the well-preserved fortifications is a mud-brick wall up to more than 12 feet wide and 15 feet high. The wall is covered in layers of mud and sand that stretch for hundreds of feet on either side. When they were built in the eighth century B.C., the fortifications formed a daunting crescent-shaped defense for an inland area covering more than 17 acres.