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A team of scientists from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles and the University of California at Davis describe ten new species of Temnothorax ants, doubling the number of species of this genus in California. What makes this discovery even more special is that each described specimen is linked to the AntWeb database by a unique identifier.

“When they are healthy, they look like tiny spheres; when they are malignant, they appear as cubes” stated Giuseppe Legname, principal investigator of the Prion Biology Laboratory at the Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA) in Trieste, when describing prion proteins. Prions are “misfolded” proteins that cause a group of incurable neurodegenerative diseases, including spongiform encephalopathies (for example, mad cow diseases) and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease

A key objective of Europe’s research and innovation policy is to take discoveries and breakthroughs from the lab and into the market place. A good example of this is the ECOPROT project, which aims to industrialise an innovative procedure for producing corrosion-protecting environmentally friendly coatings for aluminium and magnesium alloys, to be used in the aeronautics market.

Tall buildings, bridges and other long-period structures in Greater Vancouver may experience greater shaking from large (M 6.8 +) earthquakes than previously thought due to the amplification of surface waves passing through the Georgia basin, according to two studies published by the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America (BSSA). The basin will have the greatest impact on ground motion passing over it from earthquakes generated south and southwest of Vancouver.

At the beginning of each year an array of awards are given in numerous industries to the top performers of the prior year. In the arts, Cate Blanchett won a Golden Globe last week for her performance in Blue Jasmine, and in sport, Cristiano Ronaldo won the Ballon d’Or – awarded annually to the best performing soccer player – after a fantastic year with Real Madrid and Portugal.

A breakthrough using data from the Gaia-ESO project has provided evidence backing up theoretically predicted divisions in the chemical composition of the stars that make up the Milky Way’s disc – the vast collection of giant gas clouds and billions of stars that give our Galaxy its ‘flying saucer’ shape.

Food scientist Hang Xiao of the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently received a four-year, $491,220 grant to study the biochemical fate of nanoemulsion-based food delivery systems in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract, hoping to re-shape them and enhance the absorption of beneficial food components encapsulated in delivery systems.

(Phys.org) —Researchers in China have captured, for the first time, an instance of ball lightning, on digital video along with spectrographs. The accidental capture, detailed by the team in a paper they’ve had published in Physical Review Letters, offers proof that ball lightning does exist and because it was captured via spectrographs also, offers clues as to how it came to exist.

It seems paradoxical that a preference for which of two houses to buy could depend on another, inferior, house – but researchers at the University of Bristol have identified that seemingly irrelevant alternatives can, and should, influence choices. Even more remarkable is the finding that optimal choices can violate the principle of transitivity: it can be best to choose A from A or B, and choose B from B or C, but choose C from A or C.

A relatively unknown, hidden, artificial stream, called a “flume,” located in the basement of the Idaho Water Center at Broadway and Front streets in downtown Boise is the site of a collaborative research initiative by scientists from Boise State University and the University of Idaho (UI). The project is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).