Three OU astronomers today announced groundbreaking discoveries allowing scientists to understand planets outside the solar system. Professor Carole Haswell, Dr. Daniel Staab and Dr. John Barnes discovered three, new, nearby planetary systems. Research led by Professor Haswell found the exoplanets—planets outside the solar system—as part of the Dispersed Matter Planet Project (DMPP).

The project was funded by the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council and includes an international team of researchers. The project team used the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS), a high-precision planet-finding spectrograph, on the European Southern Observatory’s 3...

A new study in rats suggests that caffeine may offset some of the negative effects of an obesogenic diet by reducing the storage of lipids in fat cells and limiting weight gain and the production of triglycerides.

Rats that consumed the caffeine extracted from mate tea gained 16% less weight and accumulated 22% less body fat than rats that consumed decaffeinated mate tea, scientists at the University of Illinois found in a new study. The effects were similar with synthetic caffeine and that extracted from coffee.

Mate tea is an herbal beverage rich in phytochemicals, flavonoids and amino acids that’s consumed as a stimulant by people in southeastern Latin American countries...

For the first time, LEGO has been cooled to the lowest temperature possible in an experiment which reveals a new use for the popular toy. Its special properties mean it could be useful in the development of quantum computing.

A world leading team of ultra-low temperature physicists at Lancaster University decided to place a LEGO figure and four LEGO blocks inside their record-breaking dilution refrigerator.

This machine – specially made at the University – is the most effective refrigerator in the world, capable of reaching 1.6 millidegrees above absolute zero (minus 273.15 Centigrade), which is about 200,000 times colder than room temperature and 2,000 times colder than deep space.

The results – published in the journal Scientific R...

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) found a young star surrounded by an astonishing mass of gas. The star, called 49 Ceti, is 40 million years old and conventional theories of planet formation predict that the gas should have disappeared by that age. The enigmatically large amount of gas requests a reconsideration of our current understanding of planet formation.

Planets are formed in gaseous dusty disks called protoplanetary disks around young stars...