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In a new study, published today in the Journal of Politeness Research, academics from the University of Surrey and the University of Huddersfield have found that people are more likely to intervene in public conflicts, when they consider they are taking the moral high ground.

(Phys.org)—A team of researchers with affiliations to institutions in the U.S., Germany and Switzerland has taken another step towards understanding kin discrimination—at least as it applies to a type of bacteria. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes experiments they conducted with Myxococcus xanthus, a type of bacteria, and what they found in doing so.

(Phys.org)—A trio of researchers in Germany has found that because developing nations have increasing energy needs, they are turning to coal because it is the cheapest option available. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Jan Christoph Steckel, Ottmar Edenhofer and Michael Jakob describe their study of emerging countries and what they found regarding the reasons many of them have for using coal instead of oil or other energy producing options.

A trio of researchers at the University of Southern California has uncovered a social-network illusion that might explain why some things become popular in cyberspace while others do not. Kristina Lerman, Xiaoran Yan and Xin-Zeng Wu have written a paper describing the illusion and how it works and have posted it on the preprint server arXiv.

High street shops are well-established online these days and provide new opportunities for interaction between shop and shopper. Consumers have become accustomed to shopping using a range of devices and the immense popularity of smartphones and mobile devices has led to the rise of mobile or m-retailing, with new communication and distribution channels created with these in mind

Mark Johnson, associate professor of biology, has joined a consortium of seven other researchers in four European countries to develop the fullest understanding yet of how fertilization evolved in flowering plants. The research, employing techniques such as comparative genomics and molecular biology, could ultimately help agronomists improve crop yields for a hungry world.

Large-scale changes to the environment of the United Kingdom, including an apparent loss of habitats and agricultural land, have been revealed through an updated national map of land cover launched by researchers at the University of Leicester together with consultancy company Specto Natura on 1 July.

New research identifies the types of investors who are vigilant about corporate fraud, but finds that most of those investors are tracking the wrong red flags – meaning the warning signs they look for are clear only after it’s too late to protect their investment. The work was performed by researchers at North Carolina State University, George Mason University, the University of Virginia and the University of Cincinnati.

Swarms of microscopic, magnetic, robotic beads could be scrubbing in next to the world’s top vascular surgeons—all taking aim at blocked arteries. These microrobots, which look and move like corkscrew-shaped bacteria, are being developed by mechanical engineers at Drexel University as a part of a surgical toolkit being assembled by the Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST) in South Korea.

A new route to ultrahigh density, ultracompact integrated photonic circuitry has been discovered by researchers with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley. The team has developed a technique for effectively controlling pulses of light in closely packed nanoscale waveguides, an essential requirement for high-performance optical communications and chip-scale quantum computing.