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A quarter of all police shootings involve unarmed suspects. In a few recent cases, officers mistook cell phones and hairbrushes for guns, and shot and killed the victims. Now a study may explain--in part--these errors.

Autonomous University of Barcelona researchers, in collaboration with an experimental group from the Academy of Sciences of Slovakia, have created a cylinder which hides contents and makes them invisible to magnetic fields. The device was built using superconductor and ferromagnetic materials available on the market. The invention is published this week in the journal Science.

A clock accurate to within a tenth of a second over 14 billion years – the age of the universe – is the goal of research being reported this week by scientists from three different institutions. To be published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the research provides the blueprint for a nuclear clock that would get its extreme accuracy from the nucleus of a single thorium ion.

Researchers have designed the first theoretical model that describes the occurrence of multiple solitary optical waves, referred to as dark photovoltaic spatial solitons. The findings by Yuhong Zhang, a physicist from the Xi'an Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics of the Chinese Academy of Science, and his colleagues is about to be published in the European Physical Journal D

Our earliest invertebrate ancestors did not have brains. Yet, over hundreds of millions of years, we and other vertebrates have developed amazingly complicated mental machinery

By Nina Chestney LONDON (Reuters) - The complete melt of the Greenland ice sheet could occur at lower global temperatures than previously thought, a study in the journal Nature Climate Change showed on Sunday, increasing the threat and severity of a rise in sea level. Substantial melting of land ice could contribute to long-term sea level rise of several meters, potentially threatening the lives of millions of people.

Saying you are fond of someone might make you actually like that person, according to a study in the October 2011 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes . Psychologists showed 39 students a series of photographs of people who had been previously judged as neither pleasant nor unpleasant and instructed them to say the word “likable” or “unlikable” while viewing each one.

It sounds like the premise for a bad police drama, maybe NYPD Chimp. But scientists have found that high-ranking chimpanzees can act like cops: intervening to settle public disputes. The study appears in the journal Public Library of Science ONE

(PhysOrg.com) -- If a practical quantum computer is ever to be realized, conventional electronic devices will have to interface with the delicate quantum systems such as atoms or ions in traps or wisps of magnetism near superconducting sensors.

By Edwin Cartlidge of Nature magazine The research on which this story is based has now been published in the New Journal of Physics . [More]

By Deborah Zabarenko WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The world's oceans are turning acidic at what could be the fastest pace of any time in the past 300 million years, even more rapidly than during a monster emission of planet-warming carbon 56 million years ago, scientists said on Thursday. Looking back at that bygone warm period in Earth's history could offer help in forecasting the impact of human-spurred climate change, researchers said of a review of hundreds of studies of ancient climate records published in the journal Science. Quickly acidifying seawater eats away at coral reefs, which provide habitat for other animals and plants, and makes it harder for mussels and oysters to form protective shells.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Just as NASA engineers test new rocket designs in computer studies before committing themselves to full prototypes, so physicists will often model matter under various circumstances to see whether something new appears. This is especially true of atomtronics, a relatively new science devoted to creating artificial tailored materials consisting of neutral atoms held in an array with laser beams, or atoms moving along a desired track under electric or magnetic influence. A new study shows how a simple "joystick" consisting of an adjustable magnetic field can create several new phases of atomtronic matter, several of them never seen before.

Study in British Medical Journal finds association between prescription drug sleep aids and increased risk of death

In the lab, female rodents sometimes terminate their pregnancies after being exposed to new males. It’s called the Bruce effect, for researcher Hilda Bruce. Now a study in the journal Science [link to come] finds that the Bruce effect occurs in the wild, and likely ups evolutionary fitness.

A study in the journal of the American Medical Association reveals a dangerous difference in the symptoms men and women experience during a heart attack. Dr. Jon LaPook reports.