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Other Sciences news
(PhysOrg.com) -- Learning in dance and drama has traditionally involved face-to-face tuition, but that may change following Victoria University research into the potential of online tuition.
The SpaceMath@NASA mathematics resource for teachers and students recently achieved a landmark number of downloads.
(PhysOrg.com) -- New Oxford University research shows that membership of the British National Party (BNP) is higher where whites and non-whites live in segregated areas.
The first space tourist flights may be several years away but a group of thirsty Australian scientists are at work on the critical question -- what makes a top zero-gravity beer?
New technology is revolutionizing the precise recording of history at an ancient, lost city, bucking a tradition that has been in place for centuries. University of Cincinnati researchers will present "The Paperless Project: The Use of iPads in the Excavations at Pompeii" at the 39th annual international conference of Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA). The conference takes place April 12-16 in Beijing, China.
Warning labels on junk food would be more effective than a "fat" tax for deterring overweight people from making unhealthy purchases, a new University of Alberta study has found.
Nanotechnology news
(PhysOrg.com) -- In an interesting feat of nanoscale engineering, researchers at Lund University in Sweden and the University of New South Wales have made the first nanowire transistor featuring a concentric metal 'wrap-gate' that sits horizontally on a silicon substrate.
(PhysOrg.com) -- A Stanford research team uses glowing nanopillars to give biologists, neurologists and other researchers a deeper, more precise look into living cells.
Physics news
The commissioning of the ALBA Storage Ring started on Tuesday 8th of March 2011 at 14:00h. Within one day the beam made few turns around the machine, and on the 13th of March, after switching on the RF, the beam was stored.
Searching for magnetic fields produced by plants may sound as wacky as trying to prove the existence of telekinesis or extrasensory perception, but physicists at the University of California, Berkeley, are seriously looking for biomagnetism in plants using some of the most sensitive magnetic detectors available.
Space & Earth news
The director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute delivered a pessimistic assessment Tuesday (April 5) of the chances for significant U.S. climate change legislation, calling on the world’s academics to help find a workable path to a low-carbon global economy.
Doren in the Austrian Bregenzerwald, February 2007: a slope 650 meters long breaks, resulting in a massive slide into the valley below. The nearest residential buildings are very close to the 70-meter-high rim. This barely avoided catastrophe is not the only incident. Geologists have been monitoring increasingly unstable masses of earth over the past few years in the Alps and other Alpine regions, which have slipped down slopes and on slid unchecked down valleys to more stable substrates. The scientists are primarily looking at heavy rainfall and snowmelt caused by climatie change, which in turn has caused the substrate to soften and has increased the weight on it.
Researchers in countries such as Denmark, the Netherlands and Poland study sand drift, but most of them are focusing on sand dunes along the coastline, not on the plains further inland.
A research team, led by the University of Extremadura, has for the first time analysed the frequency of rainfall over the whole of the Iberian Peninsula from 1903 to 2003. The results show that the number of rainy days increased over the 20th Century, except in the area of the Gulf of Cádiz and in western Portugal. However, rainfall has become less and less intense, except in these two regions.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Cities worldwide are failing to take necessary steps to protect residents from the likely impacts of climate change, even though billions of urban dwellers are vulnerable to heat waves, sea level rise and other changes associated with warming temperatures.
(PhysOrg.com) -- With more than a few stamps on its passport, NASA's Aquarius instrument on the Argentinian Satélite de Aplicaciones Científicas (SAC)-D spacecraft will soon embark on its space mission to "taste" Earth's salty ocean.
Earth got a double dose of close asteroid flybys on Wednesday, April 6, 2011. Two newly discovered small asteroids both passed within the distance of the Moon.
(PhysOrg.com) -- The eruption of the Laki volcano in Iceland in 1783-84 set off a cascade of catastrophe, spewing sulfuric clouds into Europe and eventually around the world. Poisonous mists and a resulting famine from loss of crops and livestock killed thousands in Iceland, up to a quarter of the population. An estimated 23,000 people in Britain died from inhaling toxic fumes. Acid rain, heat, cold, drought and floods have been attributed to the eruption, which lasted from June until February.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Assembly and testing of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft is far enough along that the mission's rover, Curiosity, looks very much as it will when it is investigating Mars.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Neutron stars are quite unique: the material they are made of is packed much more densely than conventional matter. They rotate extremely fast about their own axis, emitting radiation in the process, so they are often visible as pulsars in the radio spectrum. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Hanover, working as part of the international PALFA Collaboration, and with the help of participants in the Einstein@Home project, have now discovered a pulsar accompanied by a white dwarf – a burnt-out star. The researchers want to weigh the pair, using what is known as the Shapiro effect.
(PhysOrg.com) -- NASA's Swift, Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory have teamed up to study one of the most puzzling cosmic blasts yet observed. More than a week later, high-energy radiation continues to brighten and fade from its location.
A new supercomputer simulation shows the collision of two neutron stars can naturally produce the magnetic structures thought to power the high-speed particle jets associated with short gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). The study provides the most detailed glimpse of the forces driving some of the universe's most energetic explosions.
Climate change is already widely recognized to be negatively affecting coral reef ecosystems around the world, yet the long-term effects are difficult to predict. University of Miami (UM) scientists are using the geologic record of Caribbean corals to understand how reef ecosystems might respond to climate change expected for this century. The findings are published in the current issue of the journal Geology.
(PhysOrg.com) -- French researchers from the University of Toulouse have published a paper in Nature, that describes how they used data from NASA's Mars Odyssey (currently orbiting the planet) to ascertain the amount of cooling that Mars has undergone over billions of years. Their work is part of an ongoing international process to reconstruct the geologic history of the Red Planet.
NASA's Kepler Mission has detected changes in brightness in 500 sun-like stars, giving astronomers a much better idea about the nature and evolution of the stars.
(PhysOrg.com) -- New analysis of images taken by ESA's Venus Express orbiter has revealed surprising details about the remarkable, shape-shifting collar of clouds that swirls around the planet's South Pole. This fast-moving feature is all the more surprising since its centre of rotation is typically offset from the geographical pole. The results of this study are published online in Science Express today.
Chemistry news
(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists from the Universities of Birmingham and Bristol have discovered how marine bacteria join together two antibiotics they make independently to produce a potent chemical that can kill drug-resistant strains of the MRSA superbug.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Germs in food, bioterrorism, drug-resistant bacteria and viruses—these are the problems of our time that make early detection of pathogens particularly important. Whereas conventional methods are either slow or require complex instruments, Yingfu Li and a team at McMaster University in Hamilton (Ontario, Canada), additionally supported by the Sentinel Bioactive Paper Network, have now developed an especially simple, universal fluorescence test system that specifically and rapidly detects germs by means of their metabolic products. As the researchers report in the journal Angewandte Chemie, It isn’t even necessary to know which substance the test is reacting to.
(PhysOrg.com) -- New scheme would use only sunlight, air and water to supply energy for cars, laptops, GPS systems.
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