For over two thousand years, musicians and scientists have puzzled over why some combinations of musical tones played together sound more harmonious than others. Now, Duke University perception scientists David Schwartz, Catherine Howe and Dale Purves have presented evidence that variation in the relative harmoniousness, or “consonance,” of different tone combinations arises from people´s exposure to the acoustical characteristics of speech sounds. Schwartz and Howe are postdoctoral fellows, and Pur

On Wednesday, July 30, as scientists all over the country looked intently on, a synthetic earthquake shook a half-real building.

Part of the structure was conventional steel: full-sized structural support columns sitting in laboratories at the University of Colorado and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).

But a third support column and the building floor that rested on them, forming a typical 1-story, 2-bay component of a modern steel frame building, exist

First Polarimetric Detection of Explosion Asymmetry has Cosmological Implications

An international team of astronomers [2] has performed new and very detailed observations of a supernova in a distant galaxy with the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the Paranal Observatory (Chile). They show for the first time that a particular type of supernova, caused by the explosion of a “white dwarf”, a dense star with a mass around that of the Sun, is asymmetric during the initial phases of exp

The world´s first human test of a vaccine against the prevalent subtype of HIV in sub-Saharan African and Asia, where millions have the virus that causes AIDS, is now under way. The clinical trial uses novel technology pioneered by scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine and the U. S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases.

The phase I trial began July 17 at Johns Hopkins University. An adult male, at low risk for HIV infection, was th

Reprogammable microarrays

Physicists at the Georgia Institute of Technology have demonstrated a new optical technique for controlling the flow of very small volumes of fluids over solid surfaces. The technique, which relies on changes in surface tension prompted by optically-generated thermal gradients, could provide the foundation for a new generation of dynamically reprogrammable microfluidic devices.

A paper describing the technique is the cover story for the August 1 iss

Classification of quantum phenomena critical to high-temp superconductivity

A team of physicists led by researchers at Rice University has developed the first thermodynamic method for systematically classifying quantum phase transitions, mysterious electromagnetic transformations that are widely believed to play a critical role in high-temperature superconductivity.

The new research is described in two papers – one theoretical and one experimental – in the Aug. 8 issue of Phy