The huge changes in the earth’s crust that shaped the face of the African continent are being re-defined according to research published in Nature Geoscience. The Great Rift Valley of East Africa – the birthplace of the human species – may have taken much longer to develop than previously believed. Lead author Dr Eric Roberts, […] … learn more→

Researchers at Penn State and the University of Notre Dame have announced breakthroughs in the development of tunneling field effect transistors (TFETs), a semiconductor technology that takes advantage of the quirky behavior of electrons at the quantum level. Transistors are the building blocks of the electronic devices that power the digital world, and much of […] … learn more→

When teachers become stressed out, who – or what – is to blame? The teachers themselves? Or the school environment in which they work? These were the questions behind a longitudinal study of teacher stress and wellbeing, involving 679 high school teachers from Australia, Norway and in international schools worldwide. Lead author Dr Richard Burns, […] … learn more→

Past disturbances, such as logging, can obscure the effects of climate change on forest ecosystems. So reports a study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper, exploring nitrogen dynamics, found that untangling climate impacts from other factors can be difficult, even when scientists have access to decades of data […] … learn more→

Antibodies that block the process of synapse disintegration in Alzheimer’s disease have been identified, raising hopes for a treatment to combat early cognitive decline in the disease. Alzheimer’s disease is characterized by abnormal deposits in the brain of the protein Amyloid-ß, which induces the loss of connections between neurons, called synapses. Now, scientists at UCL […] … learn more→

Deakin University research has shown that being too needy or not needy enough in a relationship can result in sexual issues. Christina Stefanou is conducting her doctoral research with Deakin’s School of Psychology under the supervision of Professor Marita McCabe and is looking at the connection between relationship style and sexual functioning. Preliminary results from […] … learn more→

New, more precise measurements of a particle called the W boson are again suggesting that physicists\’ prized Higgs boson is lighter than previously predicted. Using detectors at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, Duke physicist Ashutosh Kotwal and his collaborators have made the world’s most precise mass measurement of the W boson, a key […] … learn more→

Anatomy studies at Warwick Medical School have been given a technological boost as the University launches a world-first 3D anatomy learning resource in collaboration with its NHS Trust partner, University Hospital Coventry and Warwickshire (UHCW). Access to the collection of plastinated body parts is restricted due to the fragile nature of the specimens which have […] … learn more→

Smoking and drinking often go hand in hand. Therefore extending the smoking ban outside bars could help curb “social smoking”, a qualitative study published online in the journal Tobacco Control suggests. The international evidence indicates that, while the prevalence of smoking per se has decreased, social smoking— smoking intermittently or only in given situations—has increased […] … learn more→

Researchers have mapped the genome of the Tasmanian Devil for the first time, a crucial step towards understanding the transmissible facial tumours decimating Devil populations and related human cancers. < The international team, led by Dr Janine Deakin of the Research School of Biology at The Australian National University, compared the normal Tasmanian Devil genome […] … learn more→