Weekly Science Digest: Tickers, Tiny Frogs & Temporal Cloaks

Chris Austin, of Louisiana State University, has discovered the world’s smallest known vertebrate in the form of a frog found in New Guinea. Averaging only 7.7 millimetres in size, Paedophryne amauensis takes the title away from Paedocypris progenetica, an Indonesian fish averaging just over 8 millimetres. "The size limit of vertebrates, or creatures with backbones, is of considerable interest to biologists because little is understood about the functional constraints that come with extreme body size, whether large or small," said Austin.

Researchers at the University of Missouri have pioneered advanced 3D microscopic imaging that is helping scientists identify and monitor proteins involved in stiffening arteries - a major factor in cardiovascular disease. The new technology could eventually accelerate our understanding and treatment of the disease and help to combat a leading cause of death in the US as it contributes to the circulatory in disorders such as high blood pressure and diabetes. Furthermore, the team hope that the study’s findings may also be useful in future efforts to develop artificial vascular structures to improve tissue replacement.

A NASA statistical study based on six years worth of observations estimates that there are at least 100 billion planets located in our Milky Way galaxy. The technique employed, known as microlensing, uses one star as a magnifying lens, brightening the light from a background star. If planets are indeed orbiting the foreground star, the background star’s light further brightens, revealing the presence of planets that are too faint to be seen. Cool, right?

Preliminary research released by a team in China has found that adolescents with internet addiction disorder showed changes in the structure of white matter in the brain. Using MRI scanners the team compared images of the brains of 17 adolescents aged between 14 and 21 with internet addiction disorder and 16 without. By highlighting the fact that the changes affected the part of the brain associated with emotions, attention and decision making, the team sought to underline how this addiction may share psychological and neural mechanisms with other forms of substance addiction. The team now hopes to expand the sample size in order to further investigate these findings.

We may be one step closer to time travel... Researchers from Cornell University have managed to create a time or temporal cloak, albeit on a small scale, that effectively makes an event vanish by transporting information via a beam of light. The researchers hope that their findings might allow inserting an emergency signal without interrupting the main data screen, or multitasking operations in a photonic computer, where light beams on a chip replace wires.

Researchers from the University of California Los Angeles have set out to uncover the evolutionary background of the many species of New World monkeys. This BBC slide show celebrates the their varying, colourful and complex faces.  

The 'Weekly Science Digest' is a compilation of science news from around the world. News suggestions are always welcome: mark.howardbanks (at) researchgate.net