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Other Sciences news
As public sector prisons move towards the thin staffing level model of profit-making institutions, with their high turnover of personnel who are less connected to their occupation, a study funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) warns of a potentially detrimental impact on prison quality.
Smart phone users are constantly on the move, and advertisers are increasingly trying to catch them along the way. Groupon, for instance, has now launched a service pitching deals to users based on their current location. Fareena Sultan, professor of marketing and the Robert Morrison Fellow in the College of Business Administration, assesses the future of mobile marketing and the potential for consumer backlash.
Britain's centuries-old science institute The Royal Society was Wednesday awarded Spain's prestigious Prince of Asturias Prize for Communications and Humanities for promoting "knowledge for the benefit of humanity."
Many organizations are under prepared for the loss of valuable knowledge as the oldest members of the baby boomer generation near retirement.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Can the financial sector regulate itself? A study carried out by EPFL’s Swiss Finance Institute, involving 350 American institutions, shows that those that perform poorly in times of crisis will also be adversely affected the next time. The choice of the starting business model seems to be crucial.
Recent graduates browsing job announcements may not be conscious of it, but employment ads can signal whether a job is typically held by men or women, according to researchers at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, Princeton University and the University of Waterloo.
Despite the fears of some Americans, Arab television networks such as Al Jazeera do not promote anti-American feelings among all their viewers, according to a new study.
As the proliferation of social media in society continues, companies and organizations are taking advantage of online platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to communicate interactively with their customers and the public. With this influx of new technology, many organizations are struggling to find the most effective ways to manage these user interactions to maximize the positive experience for their customers. Now, University of Missouri researchers have found that utilizing a personal human voice when communicating online leads to much higher user satisfaction ratings than impersonal communication.
Natalie Portman plays an astrophysicist in the recently released movie "Thor," but she is hardly the first Hollywood actress in a leading role as an astronomer.
A perfectly preserved skull of a mastodon -- a relative of today's elephant -- was found here during excavation work at a water treatment plant, one of the scientists involved in the discovery said Tuesday.
When we speak, our enunciation and pronunciation of words and syllables fluctuates and varies from person to person. Given this, how do infants decode all of the spoken sounds they hear to learn words and meanings?
A fossil unearthed in China in the 1970s of a creature that died about 247 million years ago, originally thought to be a distant relative of both birds and crocodiles, turns out to have come from the crocodile family tree after it had already split from the bird family tree, according to research led by a University of Washington paleontologist.
Nanotechnology news
Solar cells that are more effective and cost less in production: Within the EU-project N2P (Nano to Product) researchers developed nano tuned surfaces to gain both.
Researchers from the University of Iowa Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine have found that inhaled carbon black nanoparticles create a double source of inflammation in the lungs.
Physics news
Gaining and maintaining a strong foothold in the European and global technology markets is high on the EU agenda. Helping meet this goal is the ELI ('Extreme light infrastructure') project, which clinched EUR 6 million under the Research Infrastructures budget line of the EU's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) to build a laser of intensity sufficient to rip photons into electron-positron pairs.
"Seeing something invisible with your own eyes is an exciting experience," say Joachim Fischer and Tolga Ergin. For about one year, both physicists and members of the team of Professor Martin Wegener at KIT's Center for Functional Nanostructures (CFN) have worked on refining the structure of the Karlsruhe invisibility cloak to such an extent that it is also effective in the visible spectral range.
Scientists from the University of Sheffield have developed pigment-free, intensely coloured polymer materials, which could provide new, anti-counterfeit devices on passports or banknotes due to their difficulty to copy.
(PhysOrg.com) -- It is very difficult to overestimate the importance of colloidal suspensions. Besides being an integral part of our everyday life (food, cosmetics, drugs), they also serve as an excellent model system for basic science.
A biomechanical experiment conducted at the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science has answered a long-standing theoretical question: Will microorganisms swim faster or slower in elastic fluids? For a prevalent type of swimming, undulation, the answer is 'slower.'
(PhysOrg.com) -- In a paper published on arXiv, Cuban physicist Ernesto Althsuler and his team at the University of Havana, describe how they set out to reproduce a phenomenon they had observed while brewing the Argentinean drink mate, a type of tea. Althsuler noticed that after causing hot water to drop from one vessel down a very slight waterfall into another containing tea leaves, some of the leaf particulates managed to make their way back up the waterfall and into the hot water vessel. In their subsequent research, they discovered that a small counter-flow can come into existence in small drop waterfalls along the sides; enough to carry small particles.
Researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee have for the first time successfully characterized the earliest structural formation of the disease type of the protein that causes Huntington's disease. The incurable, hereditary neurological disorder is always fatal and affects one in 10,000 Americans.
Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is a powerful tool for chemical analysis and, in the form of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), an indispensable technique for medical diagnosis. But its uses have been limited by the need for strong magnetic fields and big, expensive, superconducting magnets. Now Berkeley Lab scientists and their colleagues have demonstrated that they can do NMR in a zero magnetic field without using any magnets at all.
Space & Earth news
(PhysOrg.com) -- Shuttle Atlantis makes its final planned move from Orbiter Processing Facility-1 to the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Scientists are reporting detection of potentially toxic flame retardants in car seats, bassinet mattresses, nursing pillows, high chairs, strollers, and other products that contain polyurethane foam and are designed for newborns, infants and toddlers. In a study in ACS' journal Environmental Science & Technology, they describe hints that one flame retardant, banned years ago in some areas, actually remains in use. "To the authors knowledge, this is the first study to report on flame retardants in baby products," the report states.
(AP) -- Space shuttle Endeavour is almost at its destination.
The US space shuttle Endeavour, with six astronauts on board including an Italian, docked at the International Space Station (ISS) on Wednesday, NASA said.
Baylor University, in collaboration with the U.S Forest Service (USFS) Rocky Mountain Research Station, has developed a model that predicts the risk of wetland habitat loss based on local wetland features and characteristics of the landscape surrounding the wetland. The new model was used to predict the fate of wetland habitats over a 13-state area in the southern United States and was published in the journal Ecological Applications.
The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer will revolutionize what we know about invisible cosmic rays the same way NASA's Hubble Space Telescope rewrote what we know about the visible universe says the intellectual force behind the instrument. The AMS is to launch on space shuttle Endeavour in April.
With each European using 500 plastic bags per year, and tonnes of plastic littering the Mediterranean, the European Commission may ban them from stores or tax them to combat pollution.
Astronauts are examining several heat shield tiles that appear to have been damaged during the shuttle Endeavour's ascent into orbit, but NASA said Wednesday there was no cause for concern.
(PhysOrg.com) -- At the heart of every comet lies a remnant of the dawn of the solar system. Or is that remnants? Astronomers don't know, but the answer would give them a clearer picture of exactly how comets were born eons ago at the birth of the Solar System. Did thin tendrils of dust and ice get drawn slowly inward and pack themselves into a single, uniform mass? Or did a hodge-podge of mini-comets come together to form the core for a comet of substance?
UK and Russian scientists say they are a step closer to predicting how dangerous a volcano is after developing a method that lets them figure out how individual volcanoes are 'plumbed'.
(AP) -- A mammoth cosmic ray detector arrived at the International Space Station on Wednesday, a $2 billion experiment that will search the invisible universe and help explain how everything came to be.
(PhysOrg.com) -- University of Notre Dame astronomer David Bennett is co-author of a new paper describing the discovery of a new class of planets -- dark, isolated Jupiter-mass bodies floating alone in space, far from any host star. Bennett and the team of astronomers involved in the discovery believe that the planets were most likely ejected from developing planetary systems.
The inner core of the Earth is simultaneously melting and freezing due to circulation of heat in the overlying rocky mantle, according to new research from the University of Leeds, UC San Diego and the Indian Institute of Technology.
Chemistry news
Discovery of the new enzyme, available for manufacturing of cis-4-Hydroxy-L-proline, a material of pharmaceutical and cosmetic products.
The beneficial compounds in green tea powders aren't as stable as once thought, according to a Purdue University study that will give industry guidelines on how to better store those powders.
An old confusion about the electrical properties of water's surface has ended, thanks to scientists at Pacific Northwest and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories. The conflict arose because two types of measurements gave two radically different interpretations of what was happening at the surface of water. The team showed, through careful analysis, that the measurements weren't wrong, but rather the behavior of water's electrons influenced one measurement more than the other. The team's results provided a consistent interpretation of the different measurements and grace The Journal of Physical Chemistry B cover.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Using a new technique in which models of primitive cells are constructed from the bottom up, scientists have demonstrated that the structure of a cell's membrane and cytoplasm may be as important to cell division as the specialized machinery -- such as enzymes, DNA or RNA -- which are found within living cells. Christine Keating, an associate professor of chemistry at Penn State University, and Meghan Andes-Koback, a graduate student in the Penn State Department of Chemistry, generated simple, non-living model "cells" with which they established that asymmetric division -- the process by which a cell splits to become two distinct daughter cells -- is possible even in the absence of complex cellular components, such as genes. The study, which will be published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, may provide important clues to how life originated from non-life and how modern cells came to exhibit complex behaviors.
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