ScienceDaily: Most Popular News

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• Rare blurring of black hole light spotted
• Awake within a dream: Lucid dreamers show greater insight in waking life
• Treating mental illness by changing memories of things past
• Follow the radio waves to find hidden exomoons
• Reconstructions show how some of the earliest animals lived -- and died
• Trapped atmospheric waves triggering more weather extremes: Trend expected to continue
• Bioengineers create functional 3-D brain-like tissue: Tissue kept alive for months
• All-you-can-eat at the end of the universe: How early black holes could have grown to billions of times the mass of our sun
• Natural light in office boosts health
• Electrons moving in a magnetic field exhibit strange quantum behavior
• Type 2 diabetics can live longer than people without the disease
• Learning from origami to design new materials

Rare blurring of black hole light spotted Posted: 12 Aug 2014 11:20 AM PDT Scientists have captured an extreme and rare event in the regions immediately surrounding a supermassive black hole. A compact source of X-rays that sits near the black hole, called the corona, has moved closer to the black hole over a period of just days.

Awake within a dream: Lucid dreamers show greater insight in waking life Posted: 12 Aug 2014 09:18 AM PDT People who are aware they are asleep when they are dreaming have better than average problem-solving abilities, new research has discovered. Experts say that those who experience 'lucid dreaming' -- a phenomenon where someone who is asleep can recognize that they are dreaming -- can solve problems in the waking world better than those who remain unaware of the dream until they wake up.

Treating mental illness by changing memories of things past Posted: 12 Aug 2014 09:18 AM PDT Author Marcel Proust makes a compelling case that our identities and decisions are shaped in profound and ongoing ways by our memories. This truth is powerfully reflected in mental illnesses, like posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and addictions. In PTSD, memories of traumas intrude vividly upon consciousness, causing distress, driving people to avoid reminders of their traumas, and increasing risk for addiction and suicide. In addiction, memories of drug use influence reactions to drug-related cues and motivate compulsive drug use.

Follow the radio waves to find hidden exomoons Posted: 11 Aug 2014 02:02 PM PDT Scientists hunting for life beyond Earth have discovered more than 1,800 planets outside our solar system, or exoplanets, in recent years, but so far, no one has been able to confirm an exomoon. Now, physicists believe following a trail of radio wave emissions may lead them to that discovery.

Reconstructions show how some of the earliest animals lived -- and died Posted: 11 Aug 2014 02:02 PM PDT A bizarre group of uniquely shaped organisms known as rangeomorphs may have been some of the earliest animals to appear on Earth, uniquely suited to ocean conditions 575 million years ago. A new model has resolved many of the mysteries around the structure, evolution and extinction of these 'proto animals.'

Trapped atmospheric waves triggering more weather extremes: Trend expected to continue Posted: 11 Aug 2014 02:01 PM PDT Weather extremes in the summer -- such as the record heat wave in the United States that hit corn farmers and worsened wildfires in 2012 -- have reached an exceptional number in the last ten years. Human-made global warming can explain a gradual increase in periods of severe heat, but the observed change in the magnitude and duration of some events is not so easily explained.

Bioengineers create functional 3-D brain-like tissue: Tissue kept alive for months Posted: 11 Aug 2014 12:11 PM PDT Bioengineers have created three-dimensional brain-like tissue that functions like and has structural features similar to tissue in the rat brain and that can be kept alive in the lab for more than two months. The tissue could provide a superior model for studying normal brain function as well as injury and disease, and could assist in the development of new treatments for brain dysfunction.

All-you-can-eat at the end of the universe: How early black holes could have grown to billions of times the mass of our sun Posted: 11 Aug 2014 09:48 AM PDT A new model shows how early black holes could have grown to billions of times the mass of our sun. These giant bodies -- quasars -- feed on interstellar gas, swallowing large quantities of it non-stop. Thus they reveal their existence: The light that is emitted by the gas as it is sucked in and crushed by the black hole's gravity travels for eons across the Universe until it reaches our telescopes. Looking at the edges of the Universe is therefore looking into the past. These far-off, ancient quasars appear to us in their "baby photos" taken less than a billion years after the Big Bang: monstrous infants in a young Universe.

Natural light in office boosts health Posted: 08 Aug 2014 09:40 AM PDT Office workers with more natural light exposure at the office had longer sleep duration, better sleep quality, more physical activity and better quality of life compared to office workers with less light exposure in the workplace, a study shows. "There is increasing evidence that exposure to light, during the day, particularly in the morning, is beneficial to your health via its effects on mood, alertness and metabolism," said the senior study author.

Electrons moving in a magnetic field exhibit strange quantum behavior Posted: 08 Aug 2014 08:07 AM PDT Researchers have made the first direct observations of free-electron Landau states -— a form of quantized states that electrons adopt when moving through a magnetic field- — and found that the internal rotational dynamics of quantum electrons, or how they move through the field, is surprisingly different from the classical model, and in line with recent quantum-mechanical predictions.

Type 2 diabetics can live longer than people without the disease Posted: 07 Aug 2014 06:55 PM PDT A commonly prescribed diabetes drug could offer surprising health benefits to non-diabetics. metformin, used to control glucose levels in the body and already known to exhibit anticancer properties, could offer prognostic and prophylactic benefits to people without diabetes, researchers report in a new article.

Learning from origami to design new materials Posted: 07 Aug 2014 11:58 AM PDT A challenge increasingly important to physicists and materials scientists in recent years has been how to design controllable new materials that exhibit desired physical properties rather than relying on those properties to emerge naturally. Now physicists and polymer scientists are using origami-based folding methods for 'tuning' the fundamental physical properties of any type of thin sheet.

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