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Other Sciences news
Those seeking historic records of commercial and residential development across Utah can now access them easily online through the digital collection of Sanborn Insurance Maps at the University of Utah's J. Willard Marriott Library.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Large businesses could improve their productivity by implementing a peer group learning strategy according to the results of a recent UTS study in Indonesia.
Though "variety is the spice of life" and "opposites attract," most people marry only those whose political views align with their own, according to new research from Rice University and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Political scientists found that political attitudes were among the strongest shared traits and even stronger than qualities like personality or looks.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers at Bangor University have placed an economic value on a smile, demonstrating scientifically the effect that a genuine smile can have on our decision-making. The psychologists call this ‘social information’ and say that it has more of an effect than you may imagine.
Researchers have discovered that an evolutionary change from 65 million years ago may have set the pace for the rapid growth rate of present-day flowering plants.
(PhysOrg.com) -- According to a newly released report in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a newly refined method of radiocarbon dating has found that Neanderthals died off much earlier than originally believed. Where previous testing had shown fossils as young as 29,000 years ago, this new method puts the date closer to 39,000 years ago, sparking the debate that Neanderthals and modern humans probably never interacted in Europe.
Nanotechnology news
Transforming solar energy into a usable form is a real challenge. One technique is to use semiconductors to store the energy as hydrogen. Unfortunately, the most efficient semiconductors are not the most stable. An Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (Switzerland) team has just discovered that it is possible to protect the semiconductor with a uniform layer just a few nanometers thick.
(PhysOrg.com) -- In a step toward engineering ever-smaller electronic devices, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have assembled nanoscale pairings of particles that show promise as miniaturized power sources. Composed of light-absorbing, colloidal quantum dots linked to carbon-based fullerene nanoparticles, these tiny two-particle systems can convert light to electricity in a precisely controlled way.
Physics news
(PhysOrg.com) -- Cosmologists Alan Coley from Canada's Dalhousie University and Bernard Carr from Queen Mary University in London, have published a paper on arXiv, where they suggest that some so-called primordial black holes might have been created in the Big Crunch that came before the Big Bang, which lends support to the theory that the Big Bang was not a single event, but one that occurs over and over again as the universe crunches down to a single point, then blows up again, over and over.
For the first time scientists at Max Planck Institute in Germany have achieved guiding of electrons by purely electric fields.
Whether they know it or not, anyone who's ever gotten a speeding ticket after zooming by a radar gun has experienced the Doppler effect – a measurable shift in the frequency of radiation based on the motion of an object, which in this case is your car doing 45 miles an hour in a 30-mph zone.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Like gravity, the strong interaction is a fundamental force of nature. It is the essential "glue" that holds atomic nuclei—composed of protons and neutrons— together to form atoms, the building blocks of nearly all the visible matter in the universe. Despite its prevalence in nature, researchers are still searching for the precise laws that govern the strong force. However, the recent discovery of an extremely exotic, short-lived nucleus called fluorine-14 in laboratory experiments may indicate that scientists are gaining a better grasp of these rules.
Space & Earth news
At the same time that demand for food is soaring along with the world's population, the soil's ability to sustain and enhance agricultural productivity is becoming increasingly diminished and unreliable.
(AP) -- April was a historic month for wild weather in the United States, and it wasn't just the killer tornado outbreak that set records, according to scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
(AP) -- As the Mississippi reaches its high point in Memphis and attention turns to a time-consuming clean up, farmers downriver built homemade levees to protect their crops and engineers diverted water into a lake to ease the pressure on New Orleans levees.
Quebec unveiled an $80-billion plan on Monday to rev up forestry and mining development over the next 25 years in its vast northern region, dubbed one of the world's last unspoiled wildernesses.
(AP) -- The Mississippi River crested in Memphis at nearly 48 feet on Tuesday, falling inches short of its all-time record but still soaking low-lying areas with enough water to require a massive cleanup.
The acidification of the world's oceans could have major consequences for the marine environment. New research shows that coccoliths, which are an important part of the marine environment, dissolve when seawater acidifies.
The powerful earthquake that struck Japan in March was a 9.0-magnitude event. But this was not, as some people may assume, as registered on the Richter scale, the famed measuring system dating to the 1930s. Seismologists today do not use the Richter scale as a universal tool for measuring earthquakes, because it does not accurately measure the energy emitted in jolts as big as the one that hit Japan.
Structure exists on nearly all scales in the universe. Matter clumps under its own gravity into planets, stars, galaxies, clusters, and superclusters. Beyond even these in scale are the filaments and voids. The largest of these filaments is known as the Sloan Great Wall. This giant string of galaxies is 1.4 billion light years across making it the largest known structure in the universe. Yet surprisingly, the Great Wall has never been studied in detail. Superclusters within it have been examined, but the wall as a whole has only come into consideration in a new paper from a team led by astronomers at Tartu Observatory in Estonia.
(PhysOrg.com) -- NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite has been keeping track of the drenching rainfall that has been occurring in the central U.S. this springtime, and a newly created rain map from that data from April to May 4, 2011 shows those soaked areas.
The maiden launch of the veteran Soviet-Russian rocket Soyuz from Europe's space base in South America has been scheduled for October, a spokesman for launch operators Arianespace said on Tuesday.
Have you ever woken up at the crack of dawn, shuffled to the kitchen counter for your first cup of joe, only to discover that you're out of coffee beans?
Exactly how environmentally friendly are the various capsule systems and other ways of making coffee? Empa researchers have taken a close look at the ecological balances of the various systems currently in use. The result: it all depends on the contents. The choice of coffee has a much stronger effect on the environmental friendliness than the capsule system, type of machine or method of preparation.
To determine how best to explore asteroids in the future, NASA scientists and engineers are taking their experiments underwater in the 15th expedition of NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations, or NEEMO.
(AP) -- The Mississippi crest rolled past Memphis on Tuesday, going easy on much of the city, yet downriver in the mostly poor, fertile Delta region, floodwaters washed away crops, damaged hundreds of homes and closed casinos key to the state's economy.
The 2004 crash-landing of a NASA capsule into the deserts of Utah had mission scientists fearing for a while that samples collected by the Genesis mission, sent to capture particles from the sun's solar wind, were lost to science.
Chemistry news
Researchers in Germany have produced an antibody that allows them to distinguish the numerous types of stem cells in the nervous system better than before.
High-tech tactics to carefully examine apples and other fresh produce items as they travel along packinghouse conveyor belts will help ensure the quality and safety of these good-for-you foods.
(PhysOrg.com) -- It may not have the instant recognition of AIDS or malaria, but rotavirus -- a common cause of diarrhea -- kills more than a half million people a year, most of them children in developing countries.
Two Baylor University chemistry professors have invented a new polarimeter, a basic scientific instrument used to measure and interpret the polarization of transverse waves, such as light waves, that could prove useful in determining the purity of pharmaceuticals. Baylor has now patented the device.
How do you get to know a protein? How about from the inside out? If you ask chemistry professor James Hinton, "It's really important that students be able to touch, feel, see ... embrace--if you like, these proteins."
(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers working out of Lawrence Livermore and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories, have devised a process whereby an ordinary carbon aerogel is used as a base to create a new type aerogel comprised of diamond, making it not only denser, but translucent. In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, (PNAS), the team describes a process where a carbon aerogel is set in a pool of neon gas, then subjected to pressure and then heat, causing diamond crystals to form, resulting in a diamond aerogel.
Even the merest of microbes must be able to talk, to be able to interact with its environment and with others to not just survive, but to thrive. This cellular chatter comes in the form of signaling molecules and exchanged metabolites (molecules involved in the process of metabolism or living) that can have effects far larger than the organism itself. Humans, for example, rely upon thousands of products derived from microbially produced molecules, everything from antibiotics and food supplements to ingredients used in toothpaste and paint.
(PhysOrg.com) -- By replacing catalysts made of expensive noble metals like platinum with cheaper, earth-abundant materials, researchers have taken a step toward enabling the large-scale production of hydrogen from sunlight and water. In a recent study, the researchers have demonstrated that catalysts made of molecular clusters based on molybdenum and sulphur can generate hydrogen from sunlight at rates comparable to those of platinum.
Provided by PhysOrg.com
