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Team Detects 'Top Quark,' a Basic Constituent of Matter from PhysOrg.com
A group of 50 international physicists, led by UC Riverside’s Ann Heinson, has detected for the first time a subatomic particle, the top quark, produced without the simultaneous production of its antimatter partner – an extremely rare event. The discovery of the single top quark could help scientists better explain how the universe works and how objects acquire their mass, thereby assisting human understanding of the fundamental nature of the universe.

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New Technique Studies How Plastic Solar Cells Turn Sunlight into Electricity from PhysOrg.com
A new analytical technique that uses infrared spectroscopy to study light-sensitive organic materials could lead to the development of cheaper, more efficient solar cells. Using infrared (IR) spectroscopy to study the vibrations of atoms within the material, the technique provides information about the movement of electrons within a film of carbon-based materials.

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New technique reveals inner lives of red blood cells from PhysOrg.com
For the first time, researchers at MIT can see every vibration of a cell membrane, using a technique that could one day allow scientists to create three-dimensional images of the inner workings of living cells.

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Posted by Naboj at 06:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a personality test that is widely used and popular with the general public. There is something appealing in the idea that we all belong to one of 16 definite perosnality types, especially if the description of those types is vague enough so it seems flattering to most people. However, researchers have long had suspicions about the validity and reliabuility of that test. The following article summarizes some of the most damning findings:

The MBTI is a very popular test of personality. Each year millions of copies of the test are administered in the workplace, schools, churches, community groups, management workshops, and counseling centers. Many people see the MBTI as an invaluable tool that helps them understand their own behavior as well as the behavior of others. In spite of the popularity of the MBTI, there are many problems with its use. There is a large body of research that suggests that the claims made about the MBTI cannot be supported. In other words, although the MBTI appears to measure something, many psychologists are not convinced that any significant conclusions can be based on the test. In this article I will review the basic research that questions the validity of the MBTI.

The full articel can be read here.

Posted by Naboj at 09:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Reminders of money, relative to nonmoney reminders, lead to reduced requests for help and reduced helpfulness toward others. In short, financial success is positively correlated to unsocial tendency.

Money has been said to change people's motivation (mainly for the better) and their behavior toward others (mainly for the worse). The results of nine experiments suggest that money brings about a self-sufficient orientation in which people prefer to be free of dependency and dependents. Reminders of money, relative to nonmoney reminders, led to reduced requests for help and reduced helpfulness toward others. Relative to participants primed with neutral concepts, participants primed with money preferred to play alone, work alone, and put more physical distance between themselves and a new acquaintance.

The original articel, published in Science, can be found here.

Posted by Naboj at 10:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A recent article in PRL describes a discovery of two distinct states of superfluid lithium gas. These states are distingushed by the way the polarization of the core atoms behave:

The real-space densities of a polarized strongly interacting two-component Fermi gas of 6Li atoms reveal two low-temperature regimes, both with a fully paired core. At the lowest temperatures, the unpolarized core deforms with increasing polarization. Sharp boundaries between the core and the excess unpaired atoms are consistent with a phase separation driven by a first-order phase transition. In contrast, at higher temperatures the core does not deform but remains unpolarized up to a critical polarization. The boundaries are not sharp in this case, indicating a partially polarized shell between the core and the unpaired atoms. The temperature dependence is consistent with a tricritical point in the phase diagram.

A link to the full article can be found here.

Posted by Naboj at 10:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Protein folding is a notoriously hard problem to study, both theoretically and experimentally. A pair of Physicists at the Università di Firenze, in Italy, has found a way of representing it as a motion in curved space of possible protein configurations. They publish their results in Physical Review Letters.

We study the geometric properties of the energy landscape of coarse-grained, off-lattice models of polymers by endowing the configuration space with a suitable metric, depending on the potential energy function, such that the dynamical trajectories are the geodesics of the metric. Using numerical simulations, we show that the fluctuations of the curvature clearly mark the folding transition, and that this quantity allows to distinguish between polymers having a proteinlike behavior (i.e., that fold to a unique configuration) and polymers which undergo a hydrophobic collapse but do not have a folding transition. These geometrical properties are defined by the potential energy without requiring any prior knowledge of the native configuration.

Full article can be found here.

Posted by Naboj at 08:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Two teams of scientists have made impressive strides in decoding the Neandarthal DNA. The articles, published in Nature and Science, seem to suggest that the Neandarthals and modern humans genetically parted ways some 500,000 years ago. Thus, these two speacies did not interbreed.

Neanderthals are the extinct hominid group most closely related to contemporary humans, so their genome offers a unique opportunity to identify genetic changes specific to anatomically fully modern humans. We have identified a 38,000-year-old Neanderthal fossil that is exceptionally free of contamination from modern human DNA. Direct high-throughput sequencing of a DNA extract from this fossil has thus far yielded over one million base pairs of hominoid nuclear DNA sequences. Comparison with the human and chimpanzee genomes reveals that modern human and Neanderthal DNA sequences diverged on average about 500,000 years ago. Existing technology and fossil resources are now sufficient to initiate a Neanderthal genome-sequencing effort.

Full articles can be found here and here.

Posted by Naboj at 07:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)