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Other Sciences news
The British quest for better way of life is explored in the first research study to look at the everyday lives of the British living in France.
Research in which the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid is participating analyzes the legal challenges and problems faced by the users and communications media that utilize 2.0 social networking tools in Spain.
Flying the EU flag on public buildings on Europe Day (Monday, 9th May) has no impact on public attitudes to the EU.
What clues found on Earth do NASA scientists use to help them deduce that there may be life on other planets? Can the same process be applied in the classroom to inspire and motivate the next generation of explorers?
All high school students should be fluent in a language other than English, and it's a matter of national urgency. So says Russell Berman – and as president of the Modern Language Association (MLA), his opinion carries some clout.
Most strategies to assist the hungry, including food banks and providing food stamps through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, are short-term, emergency solutions. Those who rely on these programs face daily shortages of fresh and healthy foods, which lead to poor diet choices, nutritional deficiencies and health problems. An expert at the University of Missouri says the production of sustainable, locally grown foods is key to providing long-term food security for communities.
Despite contrary belief, reducing unemployment in locations with active insurgencies does not decrease the rate of insurgent attacks against government and allied forces. Additionally, it was found that unemployment in these same locations also had no impact in reducing the deaths of civilians.
Online social networking sites, such as Facebook, can help students become academically and socially integrated as well as improving learning outcomes, according to a study by researchers in China and Hong Kong. Writing in the International Journal of Networking and Virtual Organisations, explain that Facebook usage is around 90% across campuses and many educational institutions offer new students orientation on how to capitalize on social networking to improve their experience of their course and their final results.
Getting a tax refund from the federal government at the end of the year may not always be the best option for lower-income populations, according to the research from Harris School economist Damon Jones.
(PhysOrg.com) -- University of Arizona researcher Nina Rabin has released a new report detailing what happens to certain families and their children when parents are apprehended by immigration enforcement.
Ryan Enos is out to prove that how people naturally organize themselves in the space they live in can have huge political significance.
Researchers at Oxford University are to study ‘neuromarketing’, a relatively new field of consumer and market research, which uses brain imaging and measurement technology to study the neural processes underlying an individual’s choice.
Taking on significant debt has become "normal"—and even patriotic—to some consumers, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.
Innovative ads can help creative consumers break away from their existing thought patterns, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. These creative stimuli can affect the way consumers process information about different products.
People who read vivid print advertisements for fictitious products actually come to believe they've tried those products, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.
Every time consumers spend money on a purchase, they are giving up other consumption down the road. A new study in the Journal of Consumer Research looks at the factors that lead consumers to consider these "opportunity costs."
Consumers who set conservative goals have a harder time achieving satisfaction than those who set ambitious goals, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. When cautious consumers meet their goals, they tend to raise the bar and compare themselves to the highest possible standards.
Knowing how long a good experience will last makes it better, but being aware of the duration of an unpleasant event makes it worse, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. But people usually predict the opposite effect.
Wait times quoted by restaurants typically increase depending on the size of the party. Though large parties are often given longer wait times, the actual time spent waiting to be seated turns out to be shorter than the time estimate from the host or hostess, according to a report in the most recent edition of the Journal of Service Research.
(PhysOrg.com) -- As the world's leading authority on beads manufactured from shells by California's Chumash Indians, UCLA archaeologist Jeanne Arnold was stumped by a series of anomalous artifacts excavated at former settlements on the Channel Islands.
Evidence of lifestyle and social behavior is almost never preserved in the fossil record. Now, a group of researchers from the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle (Paris), CNRS (Paris) and Museo de Historia naturel Alcide d'Orbigny de Cochabamba (Bolivia) has excavated a remarkable collection of dozens of small mammal skulls and skeletons from the Tiupampa site in the central Andes in Bolivia that provides compelling fossil evidence of social behavior. A study of these remains, published this week in Nature, reveals the oldest example of group-living in mammals.
Digital imagery, Facebook updates, online music collections, email threads and other immaterial artifacts of today's online world may be as precious to teenagers as a favorite book that a parent once read to them or a t-shirt worn at a music festival, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) researchers say.
While adult tyrannosaurs wielded power and size to kill large prey, youngsters used agility to hunt smaller game.
Nanotechnology news
Scientists in the Argonne National Laboratory's Nanofabrication & Devices Group together with users from the University of North Carolina and North Carolina State University have written an invited review article describing recent advances using nanodiamond particles and diamond thin films for biomedical applications.
Researchers from the Basque nanoscience research center CIC nanoGUNE and Neaspec GmbH (Germany) have developed an instrument that allows for recording infrared spectra with a thermal source at a resolution that is 100 times better than in conventional infrared spectroscopy. In future, the technique could be applied for analyzing the local chemical composition and structure of nanoscale materials in polymer composites, semiconductor devices, minerals or biological tissue. The work is published in Nature Materials.
What limits the behaviour of a carbon nanotube? This is a question that many scientists are trying to answer. Physicists at University of Gothenburg, Sweden, have now shown that electromechanical principles are valid also at the nanometre scale. In this way, the unique properties of carbon nanotubes can be combined with classical physics – and this may prove useful in the quantum computers of the future.
(PhysOrg.com) -- An international research team has discovered a new method to produce belts of graphene called nanoribbons. By using hydrogen, they have managed to unzip single-walled carbon nanotubes. The method also opens the road for producing nanoribbons of graphane, a modified and promising version of graphene.
(PhysOrg.com) -- MIT researchers have created a new detector so sensitive it can pick up a single molecule of an explosive such as TNT.
Physics news
(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers at Yale University have succeeded in building a new kind of laser based on the way brightly colored birds show their colors. Building on the new approach to creating laser beams, whereby holes are drilled in a material in such a way as to trap light inside for a long enough period of time to create the laser light they are after, researchers Hui Cao, Heeso Noh and their colleagues describe in a paper they've published in Physical Review Letters, how they've emulated the way birds use air holes to display their colors.
(PhysOrg.com) -- A team of physicists from the United States and Russia announced today that it has developed a means for computing, with unprecedented accuracy, a tiny, temperature-dependent source of error in atomic clocks. Although small, the correction could represent a big step towards atomic timekeepers' longstanding goal of a clock with a precision equivalent to one second of error every 32 billion years—longer than the age of the universe.
For carbon, the basis of life, to be able to form in the stars, a certain state of the carbon nucleus plays an essential role. In cooperation with US colleagues, physicists from the University of Bonn and Ruhr-Universitat Bochum have been able to calculate this legendary carbon nucleus, solving a problem that has kept science guessing for more than 50 years.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Ocean waves can be incredibly strong and very difficult to block completely. When a wave moving across the ocean interacts with a buoy, the wave can be slightly dampened, but will still pass by if its wavelength is long enough compared to the size of the buoy. But in a new study, scientists have calculated that a periodic array of resonators (such as vertical bottom-mounted split tubes or damping buoys) resonating at a low frequency can completely block water waves. The effect arises from the water having negative effective gravity.
Space & Earth news
When Galileo Galilei turned his modest “spy glass” towards the stars in the summer of 1609, he opened up new skies. He observed things which no one had ever seen before: mountains and craters on the moon, the phases of Venus, individual stars of the Milky Way. Galileo Galilei had pushed the window into space wide open. He had no way of knowing that his telescope observed only a tiny octave in the cosmic keyboard of light, because the electromagnetic spectrum we receive from space stretches across twelve orders of magnitude: at one end are the high-energy gamma rays with wavelengths of 0.01 nanometres (one billionth of a meter); at the other, the radio region with wavelengths of several metres.
For four decades, a white dish has dominated the landscape around the village of Effelsberg in the Eifel. This is where the 100-metre telescope of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy was inaugurated on May 12, 1971. For many years it was the world’s largest fully steerable radio antenna and its huge dimensions still impress all who see it. In scientific terms, as well, the precision instrument has accomplished a great deal. We talked with Michael Kramer, one of the four Institute Directors, about the telescope’s past and its future.
Conservation group WWF Monday urged timber firms to drop plans to clear Indonesian forest areas where infra-red cameras have captured footage of rare Sumatran tigers and their cubs.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Rising nitrogen fertiliser application to sugarcane crops globally and the potential for this fertiliser to be leached from soil and lost to the atmosphere have been highlighted in a new study led by The University of Queensland (UQ) and BSES Ltd.
(PhysOrg.com) -- The Expedition 27 crew photographed this sunset over western South America from aboard the International Space Station.
Laos has told Vietnam it will suspend work on a controversial dam planned for the Mekong River, official media reported, after Hanoi sought a 10-year deferment of the scheme.
Bouncing around from cloud to cloud, and down to Earth, sunlight's warmth is both enhanced and blocked by clouds. Atmospheric scientists from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory found that clouds' overall effect on the amount of sunlight available to warm the earth depends on the wavelength of sunlight being measured. Their unexpected findings show that the sunlight scattered by clouds is an important component of cloud contributions to Earth's energy balance.
The "Dark Ages" of the universe started about 400,000 years after the big bang, after matter cooled down enough for neutral atoms to form.
People are more sensitive to metallic tastes in their water than federal guidelines about taste would suggest, according to a Colorado State University researcher’s manuscript in the Journal of Water and Health.
When last we checked in on Gliese 581d, a team from the University of Paris had suggested that the popular exoplanet, Gliese 581d may be habitable. This super-Earth found itself just on the edge of the Goldilocks zone which could make liquid water present on the surface under the right atmospheric conditions. However, the team’s work was based on one dimensional simulations of a column of hypothetical atmospheres on the day side of the planet. To have a better understanding of what Gliese 581d might be like, a three dimensional simulation was in order. Fortunately, a new study from the same team has investigated the possibility with just such an investigation.
The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia counted 548 confirmed extrasolar planets at 6 May 2011, while the NASA Star and Exoplanet Database (updated weekly) was today reporting 535. These are confirmed findings and the counts will significantly increase as more candidate exoplanets are assessed. For example, there were the 1,235 candidates announced by the Kepler mission in February, including 54 that may be in a habitable zone.
Flakes of skin that people shed at the rate of 500 million cells every day are not just a nuisance — the source of dandruff, for instance, and a major contributor to house dust. They actually can be beneficial. A new study, published in the American Chemical Society's journal, Environmental Science & Technology, concludes that oil in those skin cells makes a small contribution to reducing indoor air pollution.
(AP) -- NASA will try again next Monday to launch Endeavour on the next-to-last space shuttle flight, after replacing a switch box and plugging in new electrical wiring
The winter and early spring have been extreme across the West, with record snowpacks bringing joy to skiers and urban water managers but severe flood risks to northern Utah, Wyoming and Montana.
Recent images of the April 27 storm damage path have been captured by NASA's Terra satellite, part of NASA's Earth Observing Satellite system, or EOS. An instrument aboard Terra, called Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer or ASTER, captured the images show the scars from the outbreak.
(PhysOrg.com) -- ESA's Herschel infrared space observatory has detected raging winds of molecular gas streaming away from galaxies. Suspected for years, these outflows may have the power to strip galaxies of gas and halt star formation in its tracks.
Technologies for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere are unlikely to offer an economically feasible way to slow human-driven climate change for several decades, according to a report issued by the American Physical Society and led by Princeton engineer Robert Socolow.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Endosulfan is a leading pesticide used mainly on coffee, tea and cotton crops throughout the world, as well as a wood preservative. It belongs to a family of organic compounds known as organochlorines and is classified as one of the worst persistent organic pollutants. Because of this, it has become the most recent hazardous chemical added to the United Nations’ list of chemicals to be eliminated.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Titan, Saturn's largest moon, may have had help with the creation of its nitrogen-rich atmosphere, according to a new study published in Nature Geoscience. Scientists believe that multiple impacts by comets hitting the ammonia ice on the moon’s surface converted the ammonia to nitrogen.
Similar to humans, the bacteria and tiny plants living in the ocean need iron for energy and growth. But their situation is quite different from ours--for one, they can't turn to natural iron sources like leafy greens or red meat for a pick-me-up.
Accurately calculating the amount of carbon dioxide emitted in the process of producing and bringing products to our doorsteps is nearly impossible, but still a worthwhile effort, two Carnegie researchers claim in a commentary published online this week by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The Global Ecology department's Ken Caldeira and Steven Davis commend the work of industrial ecologist Glen Peters and colleagues, published in the same journal late last month, and use that team's data to do additional analysis on the disparity between emissions and consumption in different parts of the world.
A study by Duke University researchers has found high levels of leaked methane in well water collected near shale-gas drilling and hydrofracking sites. The scientists collected and analyzed water samples from 68 private groundwater wells across five counties in northeastern Pennsylvania and New York.
Chemistry news
If pathogens enter into our water supply network many people may fall ill quickly. To protect us against this biological threat, researchers have developed a detection system partly based on nanotechnology that can warn authorities in time.
Every boat owner recognises the dilemma: environmentally friendly or effective. Researchers at the University of Gothenburg have now found a way of reconciling these two almost unattainable aims. By using smart combinations of the most environmentally friendly biocides in the paint, it is possible to both reduce the total quantity of biocides and dramatically reduce the environmental impact.
Investigating the building blocks for next-generation computer memory has earned a University of Houston (UH) chemist his third Tier One research award.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists at the University of Toronto and Stanford and Columbia Universities have developed a way to measure the action and function of candidate prescription drugs on human cells, including the response of individual cells, more quickly and on a larger scale than ever before.
High in the sky, water in clouds can act as a temptress to lure airborne pollutants such as sulfur dioxide into reactive aqueous particulates. Although this behavior is not incorporated into today's climate-modeling scenarios, emerging research from the University of Oregon provides evidence that it should be.
Provided by PhysOrg.com
