http://www.physorg.com/ en-us Physorg.com internet news portal provides the latest news on science including: Physics, Nanotechnology, Life Sciences, Space Science, Earth Science, Environment, Health and Medicine. New discoveries have been made about how an elevated level of lead, which is a neurotoxic heavy metal, can slow the progression of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease - findings that could point the way to a new type of therapy. http://www.physorg.com/news178820014.html Medicine & Health Mon, 30 Nov 2009 16:16:05 EST news178820014 Religious people tend to use their own beliefs as a guide in thinking about what God believes, but are less constrained when reasoning about other people's beliefs, according to new study published in the Nov. 30 early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. http://www.physorg.com/news178819089.html Medicine & Health Mon, 30 Nov 2009 15:59:26 EST news178819089 Pioneering research using human brain tissue removed from people suffering from epilepsy has opened the door to new treatments for the disease. http://www.physorg.com/news178818726.html Medicine & Health Mon, 30 Nov 2009 15:56:07 EST news178818726 (PhysOrg.com) -- Bacteria don`t have easy lives. In addition to mammalian immune systems that besiege the bugs, they have natural enemies called bacteriophages, viruses that kill half the bacteria on Earth every two days. http://www.physorg.com/news178816618.html Chemistry Mon, 30 Nov 2009 15:19:21 EST news178816618 (PhysOrg.com) -- Vibrations from the environments we live and work in could be much more widely harnessed as a clean source of electricity, due to cutting-edge UK research. http://www.physorg.com/news178813490.html Technology Mon, 30 Nov 2009 14:27:43 EST news178813490 The Naval Research Laboratory's Ion Tiger, a hydrogen-powered fuel cell unmanned air vehicle (UAV), has flown 26 hours and 1 minute carrying a 5-pound payload, setting another unofficial flight endurance record for a fuel-cell powered flight. The test flight took place on November 16th through 17th. http://www.physorg.com/news178810342.html Technology Mon, 30 Nov 2009 14:00:01 EST news178810342 A University of Pittsburgh team overcame a major hurdle plaguing the development of nanomaterials such as those that could lead to more efficient catalysts used to produce hydrogen and render car exhaust less toxic. The researchers reported Nov. 29 in Nature Materials the first demonstration of high-temperature stability in metallic nanoparticles, the vaunted next-generation materials hampered by a vulnerability to extreme heat. http://www.physorg.com/news178810410.html Nanotechnology Mon, 30 Nov 2009 13:34:21 EST news178810410 Scientists are building a clearer image of the machinery employed by bacteria to spread antibiotic resistance or cause diseases such as whooping cough, peptic stomach ulcers and legionnaires' disease. http://www.physorg.com/news178810154.html Biology Mon, 30 Nov 2009 13:29:45 EST news178810154 There is a tiny period of time between the registration of a visual stimulus by the unconscious mind and our conscious recognition of it ― between the time we see an apple and the time we recognize it as an apple. Our minds lag behind our eyes, but by how long? And how does this affect our reactions to the world around us? http://www.physorg.com/news178809676.html Medicine & Health Mon, 30 Nov 2009 13:21:41 EST news178809676 (AP) -- Huge sheets of glass are guided by robotic arms, sliding and turning in a towering germ-free plant, the world's first making giant "10th generation" panels for flat screen TVs. http://www.physorg.com/news178807044.html Technology Mon, 30 Nov 2009 12:50:01 EST news178807044 An international team of applied scientists from Harvard, Hamamatsu Photonics, and ETH Zürich have demonstrated compact, multibeam, and multi-wavelength lasers emitting in the invisible part of the light spectrum (infrared). By contrast, typical lasers emit a single light beam of a well-defined wavelength. The innovative multibeam lasers have potential use in applications related to remote chemical sensing pollution monitoring, optical wireless, and interferometry. http://www.physorg.com/news178804893.html Physics Mon, 30 Nov 2009 12:40:01 EST news178804893 Those extra helpings of gravy and dessert at the holiday table are even less of a help to your waistline than previously thought. According to a new research report recently appearing online in The FASEB Journal, a diet that is high in fat and in sugar actually switches on genes that ultimately cause our bodies to store too much fat. This means these foods hit you with a double-whammy as the already difficult task of converting high-fat and high-sugar foods to energy is made even harder because these foods also turn our bodies into "supersized fat-storing" machines. http://www.physorg.com/news178806891.html Medicine & Health Mon, 30 Nov 2009 12:35:39 EST news178806891 (PhysOrg.com) -- When asked to inhibit their response to a "cocaine-cues" video, active cocaine abusers were, on average, able to suppress activity in brain regions linked to drug craving, according to a new study at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory. The results, to be published in an upcoming issue of NeuroImage, suggest that clinical interventions designed to strengthen these inhibitory responses could help cocaine abusers stop using drugs and avoid relapse. http://www.physorg.com/news178806768.html Medicine & Health Mon, 30 Nov 2009 12:33:19 EST news178806768 In the film, 'The Day After Tomorrow' the world enters the icy grip of a new glacial period within the space of just a few weeks. Now new research shows that this scenario may not be so far from the truth after all. http://www.physorg.com/news178804829.html Space & Earth Mon, 30 Nov 2009 12:30:01 EST news178804829 How does our biological system know that it is supposed to operate on a 24-hour cycle? Scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have discovered that a tiny molecule holds the clue to the mystery. http://www.physorg.com/news178804470.html Medicine & Health Mon, 30 Nov 2009 12:20:02 EST news178804470 Bacteria are quite creative when infecting the human organism. They invade cells, migrate through the body, avoid an immune response and misuse processes of the host cell for their own purposes. To this end every bacterium employs its own strategy. In collaboration with a British research group, structural biologists from the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research in Braunschweig, Germany, and the University of Bielefeld, Germany, have now elucidated one mechanism of Listeria bacteria. http://www.physorg.com/news178803891.html Biology Mon, 30 Nov 2009 12:20:01 EST news178803891 (PhysOrg.com) -- Finding and treating a tumor without disturbing normal tissue presents challenges - sometimes the most effective therapies can be invasive and harsh. http://www.physorg.com/news178804691.html Chemistry Mon, 30 Nov 2009 11:58:49 EST news178804691 (PhysOrg.com) -- Which come first, the supermassive black holes that frantically devour matter or the enormous galaxies where they reside? A brand new scenario has emerged from a recent set of outstanding observations of a black hole without a home: black holes may be `building` their own host galaxy. This could be the long-sought missing link to understanding why the masses of black holes are larger in galaxies that contain more stars. http://www.physorg.com/news178804126.html Space & Earth Mon, 30 Nov 2009 11:49:22 EST news178804126 Humans use their whole bodies, not just their ears, to understand speech, according to University of British Columbia linguistics research. http://www.physorg.com/news178803034.html Medicine & Health Mon, 30 Nov 2009 11:31:11 EST news178803034 (PhysOrg.com) -- The findings of a Spanish study claiming that Wikipedia's editors are leaving at an alarming rate have been refuted by the Wikimedia Foundation and by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales. http://www.physorg.com/news178787309.html Technology Mon, 30 Nov 2009 09:40:01 EST news178787309 (PhysOrg.com) -- While quantum dots have existed since the 1980s, only in the past decade have physicists successfully created lateral few-electron single quantum dots. These quantum dots enable physicists to manipulate quantum spins, which could be used as qubits for quantum information applications. Along these lines, a team of physicists from the National Research Council in Canada who were responsible for the original lateral few-electron single quantum dot have recently designed a new few-electron triple quantum dot circuit, and demonstrated that all three quantum dots can be tuned in resonance. http://www.physorg.com/news178789034.html Nanotechnology Mon, 30 Nov 2009 09:10:01 EST news178789034 (AP) -- There's an intriguing idea floating around the media: Microsoft Corp. wants to undercut Google so badly in Internet search that it might pay newspapers to withhold their content from Google. Just don't count on that turning into a lucrative plan for newspapers. http://www.physorg.com/news178784890.html Technology Mon, 30 Nov 2009 07:20:01 EST news178784890 (PhysOrg.com) -- Like most animals, snails have either left- or right-handed asymmetry (chirality), both internally and externally, and the handedness is hereditary. A new study has for the first time found that handedness, as seen in the direction of a snail shell spiral, can be reversed by manual manipulation of eight cell stage embryos, which is much earlier than previously thought. http://www.physorg.com/news178786914.html Biology Mon, 30 Nov 2009 07:03:02 EST news178786914 Kangaroos may provide the key to a potential treatment to prevent skin cancer, Australian scientists said Monday. http://www.physorg.com/news178782503.html Medicine & Health Mon, 30 Nov 2009 06:26:17 EST news178782503 Historic manuscripts by Sir Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin and other ground-breaking scientists will be published online for the first time, Britain's Royal Society said Monday. http://www.physorg.com/news178782363.html Technology Mon, 30 Nov 2009 05:46:30 EST news178782363 (PhysOrg.com) -- CERN's Large Hadron Collider has today become the world's highest energy particle accelerator, having accelerated its twin beams of protons to an energy of 1.18 TeV in the early hours of the morning. This exceeds the previous world record of 0.98 TeV, which had been held by the US Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory`s Tevatron collider since 2001. It marks another important milestone on the road to first physics at the LHC in 2010. http://www.physorg.com/news178781372.html Physics Mon, 30 Nov 2009 05:44:16 EST news178781372 Tiny magnetic discs just a millionth of a metre in diameter could be used to used to kill cancer cells, according to a study published on Sunday. http://www.physorg.com/news178725200.html Nanotechnology Sun, 29 Nov 2009 13:59:24 EST news178725200 (PhysOrg.com) -- New connections begin to form between brain cells almost immediately as animals learn a new task, according to a study published this week in Nature. Led by researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the study involved detailed observations of the rewiring processes that take place in the brain during motor learning. http://www.physorg.com/news178725126.html Medicine & Health Sun, 29 Nov 2009 13:52:39 EST news178725126 The concept of confinement is one of the central ideas in modern physics. The most famous example is that of quarks which bind together to form protons and neutrons. Now Prof. Bella Lake from Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (Germany) together with an international team of scientists report for the first time an experimental realization and a proof of confinement phenomenon observed in a condensed matter system. http://www.physorg.com/news178724926.html Physics Sun, 29 Nov 2009 13:49:37 EST news178724926 Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) suggest that the eccentricity of Saturn's orbit around the sun may be responsible for the unusually uneven distribution of methane and ethane lakes over the northern and southern polar regions of the planet's largest moon, Titan. On Earth, similar "astronomical forcing" of climate drives ice-age cycles. http://www.physorg.com/news178724806.html Space & Earth Sun, 29 Nov 2009 13:49:18 EST news178724806