Football fascinates millions of fans, almost all of them unaware that the game is subject to the laws of physics. Despite their seemingly arbitrary decisions, players obey certain rules, as they constantly adjust their positions in relation to their teammates, opponents, the ball and the goal. A team of Japanese scientists has now analysed the time-dependent fluctuation of both the ball and all players' positions throughout an entire match. They discovered that a simple rule governs the complex dynamics of the ball and the team's front-line. These findings, published in EPJ B, could have implications for other ball games, providing a new perspective on sports science.

Fortunately, more and more people survive critical illnesses and accidents. A new Danish-American survey shows, however, that hospitalisation where the patient has received mechanical ventilation can have serious consequences:

- Of course, the good news is that more and more patients survive critical illness and treatment using ventilators. But at the same time, the bad news is that we have now documented that the ventilator patients have a considerable risk of developing psychological problems.

The first few months after discharge are really critical, says professor of clinical epidemiology Henrik Toft Sørensen, Aarhus University and Aarhus University Hospital.

Researchers have shown that they can detect tiny, misfolded protein fragments in cerebrospinal fluid taken from patients. Such fragments have been suggested to be the main culprit in Alzheimer's disease. The findings reported in the Cell Press journal Cell Reports lend hope that doctors might soon have a way to diagnose the disease while treatments might have a better chance of working—that is, before extensive brain damage and dementia set in.

Scientists used to think amyloid plaques were the problem in Alzheimer's disease.

The top predators of the Southern Ocean, far-ranging seabirds, are tied both to the health of the ocean ecosystem and to global climate regulation through a mutual relationship with phytoplankton, according to newly published work from the University of California, Davis.

When phytoplankton are eaten by grazing crustaceans called krill, they release a chemical signal that calls in krill-eating birds. At the same time, this chemical signal — dimethyl sulfide, or DMS — forms sulfur compounds in the atmosphere that promote cloud formation and help cool the planet. Seabirds consume the grazers, and fertilize the phytoplankton with iron, which is scarce in the vast Southern Ocean. The work was published March 3 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A three-year study of ancient clam gardens in the Pacific Northwest has led researchers, including three from Simon Fraser University, to make a discovery that could benefit coastal communities' food production. PLOS ONE, a peer-reviewed science journal, has just published their study.

Amy Groesbeck, an SFU alumna, SFU professors Anne Salomon, an ecologist, and Dana Lepofsky, an archaeologist, and Kirsten Rowell, a University of Washington biologist are the authors.

The researchers discovered that ancient clam gardens made by Aboriginal people produced quadruple the number of butter clams and twice the number of littleneck clams as unmodified clam beaches. This is the first study to provide empirical evidence of ancient clam gardens' superior productivity.

2 million images collected by NASA's orbiting Spitzer Space Telescope, which went into space in 2003, have been stitched together to create a 360 degree portrait of the Milky Way.

America is a plus-size country, literally. The obesity rate remains as high and as alarming as ever. Recent data from the U.S.

Humans are creatures of sight, then we think in terms of feel and then sound. The human sense of smell does not get the credit it deserves, according to a new paper.

In an experiment led by Andreas Keller, of Rockefeller's Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior, the ability of volunteers to distinguish between complex mixtures of scents was tested. Based on the sensitivity of these people's noses and brains, the team calculated the human sense of smell can detect more than 1 trillion odor mixtures - the existing generally accepted number is just 10,000.

Neuroimages are playing a growing role in biomedical research, medicine, and courtrooms. Unfortunately, that often means they are used to bolster weak observational studies and imply correlation and causation. The people most likely to commit scientific sins with brain imaging, psychologists and neuroscientists, are least likely to acknowledge their acquisitions parameters and many other things that scientists know influence data and conclusions.