Tag Archives: geneva

Der Ton macht mehr als nur Musik

Rock, Pop, Klassik oder Jazz – Musik beeinflusst unser Leben mehr, als man denkt. Der Psychologe Marcel Zentner erforscht, wie Musik uns prägt, fördert und emotional bewegt. Dass Musik imstande ist, Emotionen auszulösen, zu unterstreichen oder zu formen, ist für ihn schon lange kein Geheimnis mehr. Wie sehr sie jedoch auf unsere Psyche einwirkt, untersucht er mit umfangreichen Tests.

Neben Themenbereichen wie Persönlichkeitsentwicklung und Psychologische Diagnostik ist ein besonderes wissenschaftliches Interesse von Marcel Zentner die Verbindung von Psychologie und Musik. „Musik vermag die Menschen auf eine ganz besondere Art und Weise zu beeinflussen. Wie dies genau geschieht und was dabei mit uns passiert, untersuchen wir mit speziell dafür entwickelten Tests“, so Zentner. (more…)

Read More

A shot in the dark: Detector at UW on the hunt for dark matter

Leslie Rosenberg and his colleagues are about to go hunting. Their quarry: A theorized-but-never-seen elementary particle called an axion.

The search will be conducted with a recently retooled, extremely sensitive detector that is currently in a testing and shakeout phase at the University of Washington’s Center for Experimental Nuclear Physics and Astrophysics. (more…)

Read More

Kofi Annan to students: ‘It’s your world now’

Former U.N. secretary-general Kofi Annan predicted during a campus visit that the civil war in Syria will become even more tragic before the international community takes action to help resolve the conflict, but said he is optimistic about the political and economic prospects for Africa in the years ahead. (more…)

Read More

Learning to Control Brain Activity Improves Visual Sensitivity

Training human volunteers to control their own brain activity in precise areas of the brain can enhance fundamental aspects of their visual sensitivity, according to a new study in the Journal of Neuroscience.

This non-invasive ‘neurofeedback’approach could one day be used to improve brain function in patients with abnormal patterns of activity, for example stroke patients. (more…)

Read More

New Global Subsidy that Provides Access to Most Effective Malaria Drugs Shows Promise

UCLA infectious diseases doctor played key role in finance strategy for therapy

A new international program, conceived in part by a UCLA physician, has rapidly transformed access to lifesaving anti-malarial drugs by providing cheap, subsidized artemisinin-based combination therapies in seven African countries that account for a quarter of the world’s malaria cases.

The first independent evaluation of the Affordable Medicines Facility–malaria (AMFm) program was recently published in the journal The Lancet. The program is based at the Global Fund in Geneva, an international financing institution dedicated to disbursing funds to prevent and treat infectious diseases. The evaluation shows that the program improved access to key artemisinin combination therapies, or ACTs, which offer broader protection and less antibiotic resistance than anti-malaria medications currently available in those African nations. (more…)

Read More

What’s Happening with the Higgs Boson

Berkeley Lab scientists, major contributors to the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, explain what the excitement is about

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, will hold a seminar early in the morning on July 4 to announce the latest results from ATLAS and CMS, two major experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that are searching for the Higgs boson. Both experimental teams are working down to the wire to finish analyzing their data, and to determine exactly what can be said about what they’ve found.

“We do not yet know what will be shown on July 4th,” says Ian Hinchliffe, a theoretical physicist in the Physics Division at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), who heads the Lab’s participation in the ATLAS experiment. “I have seen many conjectures on the blogs about what will be shown: these are idle speculation. Things are moving very fast this week, and it’s an exciting time at CERN. Many years of hard work are coming to fruition.” (more…)

Read More

The First Spectroscopic Measurement of an Anti-Atom

*Berkeley Lab scientists helped build and operate the ALPHA antimatter trap at CERN, which has now probed the internal structure of the antihydrogen atom for the first time, taking the first step toward possible new insights into the difference between matter and antimatter*

The ALPHA collaboration at CERN in Geneva has scored another coup on the antimatter front by performing the first-ever spectroscopic measurements of the internal state of the antihydrogen atom. Their results are reported in a forthcoming issue of Nature and are now online.

Ordinary hydrogen atoms are the most plentiful in the universe, and also the simplest – so simple, in fact, that some of the most fundamental physical constants have been discovered by measuring the tiny energy shifts resulting from the magnetic and electric interactions of hydrogen’s proton nucleus with its single orbiting electron. (more…)

Read More