The University of Luxembourg has agreed to actively participate in the Open Access initiative.  Defined in the Budapest (2002), Bethesda (2003) and Berlin (2003) declarations on Open Access, it is an effort to make scholarly publications freely available to the public - because the content creator pays for publication, rather than a corporation underwriting the cost and retaining copyright while charging a subscription fee for access.

Researchers have discovered a new nanometer-scale atomic structure in solid metallic materials known as metallic glasses, filling a gap in understanding of this atomic structure.

Glasses include all solid materials that have a non-crystalline atomic structure. They lack a regular geometric arrangement of atoms over long distances. "The fundamental nature of a glass structure is that the organization of the atoms is disordered—jumbled up like differently sized marbles in a jar, rather than eggs in an egg carton," says Paul Voyles, a University of Wisconsin-Madison associate professor of materials science and engineering and principal investigator on the research. 

A few hundred thousand billion free-floating, Earth-sized planets may exist in the space between stars in the Milky Way, argues an international team of scientists in Astrophysics and Space Science.

Because it's required for astronomy claims this decade, they make note that those planets could have alien life.

Athletes sometimes 'choke' - succumb to pressure and underperform - in key situations. How can an athlete be among the top 1,000 participants in the world at a task and be paralyzed by situations in a game they play with expertise?

Choking happens to lots of people.  We've all heard people say they can't take tests, for example.  A new analysis from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) suggests that when there are higher incentives to succeed, people can become so afraid of losing their potential reward that their performance suffers.

It's no surprise that tattoos and piercings have been linked to other risky decisions but capped Internet bandwidth?  

People who claim to see the 'aura' of others - and subsequently claim they can modify them - may actually have synesthesia, according to new research.

Synesthesia is believed to occur due to cross-wiring in the brain; synesthetes have more synaptic connections than 'normal' people and some are interconnected in ways others are not, including across brain regions. Since the brain regions responsible for the processing of each type of sensory stimuli are intensely interconnected, synesthetes see or taste a sound, feel a taste, or associate people with a particular color.