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Other Sciences news
Following the media coverage of England football manager Fabio Capello’s claim that he only needs ‘100 words of English’, Cambridge Dictionaries Online has used its corpus to establish which 100 he would need to aim for.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Moving to an Alternative Vote (AV) electoral system could lock extremist candidates out of office and ensue that the least popular politician has the least chance of winning according to an analysis by University of Warwick researcher Professor Dennis Leech.
Norway's more than 1,000 year-old-city and historical capital, Trondheim, was a beehive of activity in medieval times. Recent archeological research in the city's popular public forest, "Bymarka", has uncovered more than 500 charcoal pits, tell-tale signs of substantial medieval metal working activity.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Buying a new car, camera or computer? New research from the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia shows that seeking advice from expert acquaintances to choose between models of merchandise might not always be good idea.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Major newspapers in the United States are referencing Wikipedia more often and framing the online encyclopedia more positively in stories, according to a study by a pair of faculty researchers in the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Mass Communications.
(PhysOrg.com) -- In today’s world, the line between work and personal time often blurs. Communication technologies force people to negotiate when, where and how they are connected. While smartphones may increase on-the-job flexibility, they can also create unsustainable expectations of accessibility. This week, a UC Irvine team is launching a study to examine how busy professionals use and cope with wireless communication in their personal time.
Research by Warwick Business School at the University of Warwick warns that a key Government Strategy for Social Mobility is placing considerable reliance on a table which is simply replicating a well known statistical trap or artifact that may not be the true picture.
In the past several years, newspaper readership has shrunk in the tough economic climate, particularly among females. Many have criticized common news writing style used by newspapers as a possible cause for the decline. Now, researchers at the University of Missouri have found that women are engaged by all news stories the same, regardless of the style.
(PhysOrg.com) -- The expectations people have about how others will behave play a large role in determining whether people cooperate with each other or not. And moreover that very first expectation, or impression, is hard to change. "This is particularly true when the impression is a negative one," says Michael Kurschilgen from the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn, summarising the key findings of a study in which he and his colleagues Christoph Engel and Sebastian Kube examined the results of so-called public good games. One's own expectation thereby becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: those who expect people to act selfishly, actually experience uncooperative behavior from others more often.
Nanotechnology news
A new laser procedure could boost optical fiber communications. This technique could become essential for the future expansion of the Internet. It also opens up new frontiers in basic research.
(PhysOrg.com) -- A new study finds that the general public thinks getting a suntan poses a greater public health risk than nanotechnology or other nanoparticle applications. The study, from North Carolina State University, compared survey respondents’ perceived risk of nanoparticles with 23 other public-health risks.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Solar cells made from organic materials are inexpensive, lightweight and flexible, but their performance lags behind cells that contain silicon or other inorganic materials. Cornell chemist William Dichtel and colleagues have found a way to synthesize ordered organic films that could be a major step toward solving this problem.
A report, published in the March 14 edition of the Journal of Materials Chemistry, announced the successful fabrication and testing of a new type solar cell using an inorganic core/shell nanowire structure.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Anyone who's ever polished silver knows that keeping the tarnish at bay is never ending work. But, you may not know that polishing also rubs away some of the precious metal, whether it's your grandmother's silver bowl or a 19th century museum treasure.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Almost all electronic devices contain printed circuit boards, which are patterned with an intricate copper design that guides electricity to make the devices functional. In a new study, researchers have taken steps toward fabricating circuit boards with an inkjet printer. They have synthesized tin (Sn) nanoparticles and then added them to the ink to increase its conductivity, leading to an improved way to print circuit boards.
Physics news
By creating space-like conditions in a slim 4m vessel, Italian researchers have helped confirm the behaviour of astrophysical jets – streams of charged particles shot out by supermassive black holes and young stars, which stretch several hundred thousand light years across space.
A new discovery about the dynamic impact of individual energetic particles into a solid surface improves our ability to predict surface stability or instability of materials under irradiation over time.
An electrical engineer at the University at Buffalo, who previously demonstrated experimentally the "rainbow trapping effect" -- a phenomenon that could boost optical data storage and communications -- is now working to capture all the colors of the rainbow.
Space & Earth news
The first six of 18 flight mirror segments for the next-generation premier space observatory, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, are ready to begin final cryogenic tests in the X-ray and Cryogenic Facility at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., to verify they meet mirror test program requirements. The flight mirrors about to undergo cryogenic tests are the first full set to have fully completed the mirror manufacturing process.
Cutting Scotland's greenhouse gas emissions by a half within 20 years is achievable, a study suggests.
(AP) -- Russia must preserve its pre-eminence in space, President Dmitry Medvedev declared Tuesday on the 50th anniversary of the first human spaceflight by cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.
Legendary astronauts, including a veteran of the US Apollo programme and the first man to walk in space Tuesday joined the widow of Yuri Gagarin in the Kremlin to remember his space flight 50 years ago.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Volcanologists from Massey University and the University of Hamburg in Germany will soon be able to record every explosive burst out of Mt Ruapehu in rain or shine, day or night, with a new high-speed Doppler Radar system.
Thirty years ago, on April 12, 1981, the U.S. Space Shuttle made its first voyage into space. Four years later, on the same date, rookie astronaut Jeffrey Hoffman made the first of his five flights as a shuttle astronaut. MIT News asked Hoffman, now Professor of the Practice of Astronautics at MIT, to reflect on the shuttle’s history and influence.
A leading climate scientist warned Tuesday that Europe should take action over increasing drought and floods, stressing that some climate change trends were clear despite variations in predictions.
Reactive nitrogen compounds from agriculture, transport, and industry lead to increased emissions of the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide (N2O) from forests in Europe. Nitrous oxide emission from forest soils is at least twice as high as estimated so far by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This is one of the key messages of the first study on nitrogen in Europe (European Nitrogen Assessment, ENA) that is presented this week at the International Conference "Nitrogen and Global Change 2011" in Edinburgh, Scotland.
One year after the BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion on the Gulf Coast, new research from the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire shows that despite the roughly equivalent economic compensation, Louisiana and Florida residents differ in perceptions about the current and long-term effects of the largest marine oil spill in U.S. history.
(PhysOrg.com) -- It might seem surprising that marine scientists are proposing a way for the oil and gas industry to save billions of dollars decommissioning old offshore rigs, but it's a plan where the main beneficiary is intended to be the environment.
Offshore oil drilling group Transocean claimed Tuesday that it had a set a world record for deep water drilling at an ocean depth of 3,107 metres (10,194 feet) off the coast of India.
NASA's three remaining space shuttles will go to Cape Canaveral, Los Angeles and suburban Washington when the program ends this summer, the space agency said Tuesday.
A 1961 Soviet space capsule is being auctioned in New York City.
Russia on Tuesday marked a half century since Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, the greatest victory of Soviet science which expanded human horizons and still remembered by Russians as their finest hour.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Extracting natural gas from the Marcellus Shale could do more to aggravate global warming than mining coal, according to a Cornell study published in the May issue of Climatic Change Letters (105:5).
(PhysOrg.com) -- Enrico Fermi, the famous Italian physicist, once asked the question; if intelligent life has come to exist many times in our galaxy, why is there no sign of it? It’s a clearly valid point, when you consider the number of planets and solar systems that exist out there. If there are other intelligent beings out there somewhere, how come they haven’t responded to our messages?
(PhysOrg.com) -- At the European Geosciences Union (EGU) meeting last week, lead researcher Rinus Wortel from the University of Utrecht presented the findings that Europe is slowly moving under Africa, creating a new subduction zone.
(PhysOrg.com) -- A flat, light-toned rock on Mars visited by NASA's Mars Exploration Rover in 2005 informally bears the name of the first human in space, Yuri Gagarin, who rode into orbit in the Soviet Union's Vostok-1 spacecraft on April 12, 1961.
During the past 60 years, humans have built rockets, walked on the moon and explored the outer reaches of space with probes and telescopes. During these trips in space, research has been conducted to learn more about life and space. Recently, a group of prominent researchers from across the country published a report through the National Academy of Sciences that is intended as a guide as NASA plans the next 10 years of research in space. Rob Duncan, the University of Missouri Vice Chancellor for Research, led the team that developed a blueprint for fundamental physics research in space for the next 10 years.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Using the amplifying power of a cosmic gravitational lens, astronomers have discovered a distant galaxy whose stars were born unexpectedly early in cosmic history. This result sheds new light on the formation of the first galaxies, as well as on the early evolution of the Universe.
Chemistry news
A UC Davis chemical engineer has won a five-year, $420,000 early career development award from the National Science Foundation to support research on electrical charges of fluid droplets.
(PhysOrg.com) -- You can't see them, or smell them or taste them. They can be in our water and in our food, multiplying so rapidly that conventional testing methods for detecting pathogens such as E.coli, salmonella and listeria come too late for the tens of thousands of Canadians who suffer the ill effects of these deadly bacteria.
Provided by PhysOrg.com
