[Updates] Space Exploration - Astronomy - Physics - Geoscience - History - Anthropology - Archeology - Paleontology & more...
For more information about Updates, Click on the titles:
A significant gap between the best and worst maths trainee teachers in England has been revealed in new research published today (22nd March 2011). This applies to both general Primary trainee teachers and to Secondary specialist trainee maths teachers.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Cause marketing -- when firms share proceeds from the sale of products with a social cause -- reduces charitable giving by consumers, says a researcher at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Although U.S. personal income per capita has risen 5.7 percent since 2000, an increase in tax-exempt benefits provided by the government and employers accounted for all of the income growth in the past decade, says a University of Michigan economist.
Three National Science Foundation-supported researchers recently undertook the first non-Iraqi archaeological investigation of the Tigris-Euphrates delta in nearly 20 years. Archeologists Jennifer Pournelle and Carrie Hritz, with geologist Jennifer Smith, carried out the study late last year to look for links between wetland resources and the emergence of Mesopotamian cities.
The last volume of the expedition newspaper, South Polar Times, written by the men waiting for news of Captain Scott’s return from the South Pole in the Antarctic winter of 1912, has just been published in a limited edition by the Scott Polar Research Institute.
Although the green toad (Bufo viridis) can today be found all over Central Europe, Asia, Africa, and even on the Balearic Islands, it became extinct in the Iberian Peninsula at the end of the Early Pleistocene (1.1 million years ago). This has been demonstrated by an international research study, with Spanish participation, which has discovered the first green frog fossil in Murcia.
A ground-breaking report released today highlights the wide range of health care needs affecting older women.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Origami, the ancient Japanese art of folding objects in simple, yet complicated ways, has in recent years been applied to various engineering challenges, such as how to fold up a solar array for transport to outer-space where it can be easily unfolded before use.
Philadelphia Phillies, St. Louis Cardinals and San Francisco Giants should win their divisions, while the Atlanta Braves will take the wild card slot in the National League (NL), according to NJIT's baseball guru Bruce Bukiet. For over a decade, Bukiet, an associate professor and associate dean, has applied mathematical analysis to compute winning games for each Major League Baseball Team.
Nanotechnology news
Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology have developed a way to measure the wear and degradation of the microscopic probes used to study nanoscale structures in situ and as it’s happening. Their technique can both dramatically speed up and improve the accuracy of the most precise and delicate nanoscale measurements done with atomic force microscopy (AFM).
Fuel cells have been touted as a cleaner solution to tomorrow's energy needs, with potential applications in everything from cars to computers.
Physics news
On April 8, 2011, the scientific community will celebrate the centennial of the discovery of superconductivity—the ability of certain materials to conduct electricity without resistance when cooled below a specific temperature.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers working on an advanced experimental fusion machine are readying experiments that will investigate a host of scientific puzzles, including how heat escapes as hot magnetized plasma, and what materials are best for handling intense plasma powers.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have for the first time used an apparatus that relies on the "noise" of jiggling electrons to make highly accurate measurements of the Boltzmann constant, an important value for many scientific calculations. The technique is simpler and more compact than other methods for measuring the constant and could advance international efforts to revamp the world’s scientific measurement system.
Scientists in Belgium and Spain have proved for the first time that new systems of quantum cryptology are much safer than current security systems. The study was published in the journal Nature Communications.
(PhysOrg.com) -- For some years now, NASA has been using what are called thermoelectric materials to power its space probes. The probes travel such great distances from our sun that solar panels are no longer an efficient source of power. So NASA imbeds a nuclear material in a radioisotope thermal generator, where it decays, producing heat energy. That energy is then converted by thermoelectric materials into the electricity that powers the space probe. The same technology is now being explored for more earthly applications, for example, to capture heat lost in the exhaust of automobiles to produce electricity for the vehicle.
(PhysOrg.com) -- As part of the quest to form perfectly smooth single-molecule layers of materials for advanced energy, electronic, and medical devices, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have discovered that the molecules in thin films remain frozen at a temperature where the bulk material is molten. Thin molecular films have a range of applications extending from organic solar cells to biosensors, and understanding the fundamental aspects of these films could lead to improved devices.
Do the principles of quantum mechanics apply to biological systems? Until now, says Prof. Ron Naaman of the Institute's Chemical Physics Department (Faculty of Chemistry), both biologists and physicists have considered quantum systems and biological molecules to be like apples and oranges. But research he conducted together with scientists in Germany, which appeared recently in Science, definitively shows that a biological molecule – DNA – can discern between quantum states known as spin.
(PhysOrg.com) -- In new work, high-energy physicists have observed two long-sought quantum states in the bottomonium family of sub-atomic particles. The result will help researchers better understand one of the four fundamental forces of the universe — the strong force — that helps govern the interactions of matter.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Maryland have created the first nontrivial "atom circuit," a donut-shaped loop of ultracold gas atoms circulating in a current analogous to a ring of electrons in a superconducting wire. The circuit is "nontrivial" because it includes a circuit element—an adjustable barrier that controls the flow of atom current to specific allowed values. The newly published work was done at the Joint Quantum Institute, a NIST/UM collaboration.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Completing the story they started by creating synthetic magnetic fields, scientists from the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI), a collaboration of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Maryland, have now made atoms act as if they were charged particles accelerated by electric fields.
Space & Earth news
Eminent seismologist Hiroo Kanamori, Caltech's Smits Professor of Geophysics, Emeritus, has been studying the movement of the earth his entire career. On March 11 he was in Tokyo, experiencing firsthand the largest earthquake in the country's recorded history.
(AP) -- Space shuttle commander Mark Kelly is still awaiting doctors' final OK on whether his congresswoman wife can attend his launch in just under three weeks.
Military personnel and contractors stationed in Iraq risk not only enemy gunfire, suicide bombers, and roadside bombs, but the very air they breathe often is polluted with dust and other particles of a size and composition that could pose immediate and long-term health threats, scientists reported today at the 241st National Meeting of the American Chemical Society.
In the first report on the uptake and internal processing of triclocarban (TCC) in fish, scientists today reported strong evidence that TCC — an antibacterial ingredient in some soaps and the source of environmental health concerns because of its potential endocrine-disrupting effects — has a "strong" tendency to bioaccumulate in fish. They presented the findings here today at the 241st National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society.
(PhysOrg.com) -- University of Sydney astrophysicists are behind a major breakthrough in the study of stars known as red giants, finding a way to peer deep into their cores to discover which ones are in early infancy, which are fresh-faced teenagers, and which are facing their dying days.
Scientists tracking the annual maximum extent of Arctic sea ice said that 2011 was among the lowest ice extents measured since satellites began collecting the data in 1979. Using satellites to track Arctic ice and comparing it with data from previous years is one way that scientists track change in the Arctic system.
(AP) -- Federal scientists say they have dated coral living near the site of the busted BP oil well in the Gulf of Mexico at 2,000 years old.
A team of scientists in the United Kingdom and the United States has warned that the native fauna and unique ecology of the Southern Ocean, the vast body of water that surrounds the Antarctic continent, is under threat from human activity. Their study is published this week in the peer-reviewed journal Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.
Satellite images have been essential for helping relief efforts in Japan following the massive quake that struck on 11 March. Now scientists are using ESA’s space radars to improve our understanding of tectonic events.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists recently completed a series of nighttime, ground-based testing of the German Receiver for Astronomy at Terahertz Frequencies, or GREAT, spectrometer in preparation for a series of astronomical science flights on the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy in April. With the SOFIA 747SP aircraft positioned on the ramp outside NASA’s Dryden Aircraft Operations Facility, the upper door covering the telescope was opened and GREAT’s interaction with the telescope was evaluated.
Data from NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission or TRMM satellite was used to create a rainfall map of the severe rains that fell in Thailand recently. More than 20 people have been killed in southern Thailand over the past week due to flooding and mudslides caused by extremely heavy rainfall.
The search for alien life usually focuses on planets around other stars. But a lesser-known possibility is that life has sprung up on planets that somehow were ejected from their original solar systems and became free-floating in the universe, as well as on small bodies called sub-brown dwarfs, which are stars so small and dim they are not really stars at all, but function more like planets.
(PhysOrg.com) -- In a recent study published in Nature Climate Change, Dr. Ulrike Burkhardt and Dr. Bernd Karcher from the Institute for Atmospheric Physics at the German Aerospace Centre show that the contrails created by airplanes are contributing more to global warming that all the CO2 that has been caused by the entire 108 years of airplane flight.
In a paper to be published in the April 10, 2011, issue of The Astrophysical Journal, scientists on NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) mission, including lead author Nathan Schwadron and others from the University of New Hampshire, isolate and resolve the mysterious "ribbon" of energy and particles the spacecraft discovered in the heliosphere – the huge bubble that surrounds our solar system and protects us from galactic cosmic rays.
The beautiful and distinctive U-shaped glacial valleys typical of alpine areas from Alaska to New Zealand have fascinated and frustrated geologists for centuries.
One of the great American myths claims that before Europeans colonists settled in North America, Native Americans existed in total harmony with nature, surviving on the renewable bounty that the continent's natural environment provided and altering little of the surrounding landscapes. They were America’s first environmentalists and the land they lived in remained unspoiled. But that is not entirely true.
(PhysOrg.com) -- In a celestial forensic exercise, scientists analyzing data from NASA's Cassini, Galileo and New Horizons missions have traced telltale ripples in Saturn and Jupiter's rings to specific collisions with cometary fragments that occurred decades, not millions of years, ago.
Chemistry news
Trace-explosives detectors (TEDs) are an increasingly common sight at airports and on loading docks, and emergency response personnel carry them to evaluate suspicious packages. A new test material developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in cooperation with ASTM International enables users of these products to evaluate their performance and reliability.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Using a small block of aluminum with a tiny groove carved in it, a team of researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Polytechnic Institute of New York University is developing an improved “green chemistry” method for making biodegradable polymers. Their recently published work is a prime example of the value of microfluidics, a technology more commonly associated with inkjet printers and medical diagnostics, to process modeling and development for industrial chemistry.
In a scientific advance literally plucked from the waste heap, scientists today described a key step toward using the billions of pounds of waste chicken feathers produced each year to make one of the more important kinds of plastic. They described the new method at the 241st National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society, being held here this week.
Scientists led by Carnegie Mellon University chemist Krzysztof Matyjaszewski are using electricity from a battery to drive atom transfer radical polymerization (ATRP), a widely used method of creating industrial plastics. The environmentally friendly approach, reported in the April 1 issue of Science, represents a breakthrough in the level of control scientists can achieve over the ATRP process, which will allow for the creation of even more complex and specialized materials.
Provided by PhysOrg.com
