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Magazine preview: China's first global brand is on the cusp of a critical transition. Which computer maker this year introduced three new tablets , a speedy new smartphone, an edgy new global branding campaign , and the launch of an outer space science competition with Google

(PhysOrg.com) -- In investigating the behavior of large-amplitude standing water waves, mathematician Jon Wilkening of the University of California, Berkeley, has discovered that the waves’ behavior cannot be explained as simply as previously proposed.

Do we have free will? It is an age-old question which has attracted the attention of philosophers, theologians, lawyers and political theorists.

They go by many names: Brain worms, sticky music (thanks Oliver Sacks), cognitive itch, stuck song syndrome. But the most common (if also the most repugnant) is earworms, a literal translation from Ohrwurm , a term used to describe the phenomenon (and perhaps bring to mind an immediate association with corn earworms ).

STATE COLLEGE, Pa.--Last night I witnessed the aftermath of the brief, angry riot at Penn State: an overturned news van being righted by a bulldozer, debris from battered cars and upended trash cans littering the street, college kids in “Joe Knows Football” t-shirts stumbling away from College Avenue with pepper sprayed red eyes and tear-stained faces, courtesy of the police. The students had reacted violently to the 10 p.m

The Japanese government is searching for new ways to clean up the mess created by the reactor meltdowns earlier this year at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant . As lawmakers and officials study new energy policy options , which they plan to present by next spring, a company called Cyberdyne, Inc. is offering to help with the more immediate concern of removing radioactive debris in and around the reactors with the help of a robotic exoskeleton.

LAS VEGAS–Three-dimensional medical imaging of two baby woolly mammoths from Siberia named Lyuba and Khroma has given scientists an unprecedented view of the internal anatomy of these creatures. At the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, Ethan Shirley and Daniel Fisher of the University of Michigan and their colleagues presented the results of their analyses of the images. I wrote about their observations–and the intriguing new questions they raise about mammoth development and evolution– here .

When people email photos, they sometimes compress the images, removing redundant information and thus reducing the file size. Compression is generally thought of as something to do to data after it has been collected, but mathematicians have recently figured out a way to use similar principles to drastically reduce the amount of data that needs to be gathered in the first place

Photos taken by the researchers show plasma arcs up to 60 meters long casting an eerie blue glow over buildings and trees at the High Voltage Laboratory at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.

Dutch researchers at the University of Twente's MESA+ research institute, together with ASML, TNO (the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research) and TU/e (Eindhoven University of Technology) have developed a method for etching 3D structures in silicon.

HOHHOT, China -- It was late spring, and armed police were barring Inner Mongolia University students from leaving campus to protest the death of a herder run over by a coal truck. Students amassed in towns across the province to condemn coal companies they accused of riding roughshod over livestock grazing land

HOHHOT, China -- It was late spring, and armed police were barring Inner Mongolia University students from leaving campus to protest the death of a herder run over by a coal truck. Students amassed in towns across the province to condemn coal companies they accused of riding roughshod over livestock grazing land.

In a paper published Nov. 2 in Nature Communications, a team of researchers led by University of Maryland's Ichiro Takeuchi, in collaboration with Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource's Apurva Mehta, reported the discovery of large magnetostriction in an iron/cobalt alloy — in other words, the alloy shows a mechanical strain when a magnetic field is applied.

A recent study showed that certain brain areas expand in people who have greater numbers of friends on Facebook . This was welcome news for online social network addicts, particularly teenagers : "Mom, I'm not just on Facebook ; I'm doing my temporal lobe calisthenics." There was a problem, though

A team of University researchers will get their hands on some of Europe’s fastest supercomputers in a bid to crack Einstein’s theory of relativity and help describe what happens when two black holes collide.