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Other Sciences news
The royal wedding raises concerns about rules of succession that reflect centuries-old prejudices against women and Catholics. But changing them will be a logistical nightmare, writes George Williams, UNSW’s Anthony Mason professor of law.
After posting modest job losses last calendar year following an abysmal 2009, the Oakland County economy should add nearly 29,000 jobs over the next three years—the best years since 2000, say University of Michigan economists.
Digging in the ground to plant trees may be an excellent gateway to further involvement in politics and civic affairs, concludes a new University of Maryland study, based on work with New York City environmental volunteers.
Elena Karpova says U.S. consumers are increasingly interested in "fast fashion" -- more frequent replacement of inexpensive clothes that become obsolete several weeks after they're purchased. And the Iowa State University apparel, educational studies and hospitality management assistant professor reports that the U.S. apparel industry has responded in kind with its product lines.
As food suppliers attempt to meet the growing demand for local products, a new study finds it's not always economically or environmentally viable for multi-product industries to focus heavily on local sales.
Without sufficient investments in upstream oil field activities utilizing new and advanced technologies, Mexico faces the prospect of becoming a net oil importer in 10 years, according to new research by Rice University's James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy and Oxford University. The stakes of the current political stalemate over oil are quite high, the study concluded. Were Pemex, Mexico's national oil company, able to fully develop its oil in line with international standards and technology, Mexican citizens could earn $1,055 per capita per year by 2020, versus $546 if current trends continue.
Yale University's famous motto is Lux et Veritas, Latin for "light and truth" while Princeton's crest reads Dei Sub Numine Viget ("Under God's power she flourishes"). The University of Pennsylvania based its cautionary motto -- Sine Moribus Vanae or "Letters without morals are useless" -- on a line in one of the Roman poet Horace's odes. But in 1898, when someone pointed out that the line could also be translated as "Loose women without morals", the University rushed to revise the wording.
Australian researchers have done the impossible -- they’ve found the sixty-trillionth binary digit of Pi-squared! The calculation would have taken a single computer processor unit (CPU) 1,500 years to calculate, but scientists from IBM and the University of Newcastle managed to complete this work in just a few months on IBM's "BlueGene/P" supercomputer, which is designed to run continuously at one quadrillion calculations per second.
Nanotechnology news
(PhysOrg.com) -- With the creation of a 3-D nanocone-based solar cell platform, a team led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Jun Xu has boosted the light-to-power conversion efficiency of photovoltaics by nearly 80 percent.
Physics news
(PhysOrg.com) -- For at least 20 years, organic chemists and materials scientists have used microwaves as an alternative energy source to activate materials and break chemical bonds. However, though microwaves are clearly useful, scientists have remained largely in the dark on exactly how they provide special heating properties.
(PhysOrg.com) -- The long running debate on whether cell phones are capable of damaging human tissue and causing health problems received new fuel from a paper published at arXiv by theoretical biologist Bill Bruno from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
A team of researchers at MIT has found a way to manipulate both the thermal conductivity and the electrical conductivity of materials simply by changing the external conditions, such as the surrounding temperature. And the technique they found can change electrical conductivity by factors of well over 100, and heat conductivity by more than threefold.
Space & Earth news
(AP) -- It's a sight many Americans would surely love to see: a recovering Rep. Gabrielle Giffords watching as her astronaut husband blasts off into space.
International Space Station astronauts sent greetings from the cosmos to Prince William and Kate Middleton after soaring over Britain on the eve of the royal wedding Friday.
(AP) -- Six astronauts have said their goodbyes to their families and are ready to take space shuttle Endeavour on its final flight Friday as hundreds of thousands gather along Florida's Space Coast to cheer the spectacle.
The US space shuttle Endeavour is poised to launch Friday carrying a multibillion dollar tool for searching the universe on the penultimate flight for NASA's 30-year program.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Friday fired the Russian space agency chief after a series of high-profile setbacks cast a shadow on the 50th anniversary year of Yuri Gagarin's first space flight.
(AP) -- Just a few hours from liftoff, NASA fueled space shuttle Endeavour for one last ride into orbit Friday as hundreds of thousands of visitors began to converge on the coast for prime viewing spots.
Today, scientists from the California Academy of Sciences will launch the most comprehensive scientific survey effort ever conducted in the Philippines, documenting both terrestrial and marine life forms from the tops of the highest mountains to the depths of the sea. They will be joined by colleagues from the University of the Philippines, De La Salle University, the Philippines National Museum and the Philippines Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources, as well as by a team of Academy educators who will work to share the expedition's findings with local community and conservation groups. The expedition, which will conclude with a symposium at the University of the Philippines on June 8, is funded by a generous gift from Margaret and Will Hearst.
A team of scientists has produced an innovative new study of the environmental impact of major urban ecosystems, published in the April issue of the journal Ecological Applications.
Researchers at Missouri University of Science and Technology have developed a method to detect the presence of soil and groundwater contamination without turning a shovel or touching the water.
An unmanned Russian cargo vessel on Friday docked without a hitch at the International Space Station, bringing a fresh supply of oxygen and equipment to the six-member crew.
Smog and soot levels have dropped significantly in Southern California over the last decade, but the Los Angeles region still has the highest levels of ozone nationwide, violating federal health standards an average of 137 days a year.
Some of the killer tornadoes that ripped across the South may have been among the largest and most powerful ever recorded, experts suggested, leaving a death toll that is approaching that of a tragic "super outbreak" of storms almost 40 years ago.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Boston University College of Arts & Sciences Paleoclimatologist Maureen Raymo and colleagues have published findings that should help scientists better estimate the level of sea level rise during a period of high atmospheric carbon dioxide levels 3 million years ago. That geologic era, known as the mid-Pliocene climate optimum, saw much higher global temperatures that may have been caused by elevated levels of carbon dioxide—an analogy for the type of climate we are causing through human addition of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.
China will attempt its first space docking between two unmanned vehicles this year, the first step in efforts to build a Chinese space station, a senior official said Friday.
(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.
One way of telling how much carbon dioxide was in the atmosphere in the past is by counting pores (or stomata) in leaves – the tiny openings plants use to absorb CO2 and lose water. It may seem far-fetched, but plants tend to decrease the number of pores when the atmospheric CO2 is increased.
The historic next-to-last space shuttle launch was scratched Friday because of mechanical problems, spoiling a visit from the president and dashing the hopes of the biggest crowd of spectators in years, including the mission commander's wounded wife, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.
(PhysOrg.com) -- One day, years from now--or maybe billions of years, no one knows--aliens might be surprised to run across an old spaceship from Earth. Improbably far from home, the ancient probe is space cold, its nuclear power source spent long ago; an iconic white antenna points silently into the void, beaming no data to the species that made it. Yet this Voyager may speak to its finders.
Whether it's a giant solar flare or a beautiful green-blue aurora, just about everything interesting in space weather happens due to a phenomenon called magnetic reconnection. Reconnection occurs when magnetic field lines cross and create a burst of energy. These bursts can be so big they're measured in megatons of TNT.
(PhysOrg.com) -- An international team of astronomers today revealed details of a "super-exotic" exoplanet that would make the planet Pandora in the movie Avatar pale in comparison.
(PhysOrg.com) -- New GPS data of the 2010 earthquake that devastated parts of Chile and killed over 500 people is revealing new clues about large earthquakes such as the quake in Chile and the magnitude 9.0 earthquake that struck near the east coast of Japan on 11 March this year.
(PhysOrg.com) -- More than 30 years after they left Earth, NASA's twin Voyager probes are now at the edge of the solar system. Not only that, they're still working. And with each passing day they are beaming back a message that, to scientists, is both unsettling and thrilling.
Chemistry news
(PhysOrg.com) -- Mark Hersam of Northwestern University will be more interested than most Americans when the space shuttle Endeavour lifts off for the last time Friday, April 29. Six little pieces of himself and his research team -- scientific samples each a square inch in size -- will be on board.
Scientists using Diamond Light Source have made a breakthrough in the battle against tooth decay, with research published in the leading Journal of Molecular Biology (JMB) on 29 April 2011.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists are envious of nature because of its ability to build up highly complex structures like organs and tissues in an ordered fashion without any problem; it takes a great deal of effort for scientists to produce defined microscale structures. Pierre Schaaf and a team of scientists from Strasbourg have now imitated a few of nature’s tricks in order to get a polymer film to "grow" onto a surface. As the researchers report in the journal Angewandte Chemie, they used morphogens as nature does. These signal molecules show a reaction which way it should go.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Using a new laser technique, Jim Moran and his colleagues at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, have devised a method of separating out the parts of hair samples that can reveal details about the recent history of the person to whom it belongs.
Imagine, for a moment, that you must live on 99 cents per day. How would you manage it? For roughly 850 million people around the globe, this is not a hypothetical question; those people really have daily purchasing power roughly equal to what a dollar buys in the United States. And yet they carve out lives, run businesses and raise children.
In a controlled study, fingerprint examiners who determined that a crime scene-quality print matched a high-quality sample from the same individual were correct 99.8% of the time.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Evidence supporting the link between savings and college success is growing. Three studies out of the Center for Social Development (CSD) at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis offer a connection between assets and college enrollment and completion.
American companies and organizations spend billions of dollars every year on leadership training for their managers. To improve job performance they ought instead to focus on what managers believe about their employees, a study by the University of California, Riverside shows.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Companies involved in merger talks manipulate their stock prices during negotiations by releasing more news than usual, according to a University of Michigan study.
It's an unfamiliar neighborhood and you find yourself in the middle of a bunch of streets and buildings you've never seen before. Giving the environment a quick once-over, you make a snap decision about whether you're safe or not. And chances are, that first 'gut' call is the right one, say Binghamton University researchers Dan O'Brien and David Sloan Wilson in an article published in the current issue of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
The University of Arizona's math department is experimenting with a novel approach to early math instruction – one with a heavy emphasis on technology and peer-to-peer tutoring.
Nanotechnology news
(PhysOrg.com) -- University of Arizona engineers have patented a process that could lead to the next big leap in microelectronics, completely changing the way microchips are made. Pierre Deymier, a professor of materials science and engineering, is one of the UA faculty members who invented the process.
Researchers at Oregon State University have found a way to use magnetic "nanobeads" to help detect chemical and biological agents, with possible applications in everything from bioterrorism to medical diagnostics, environmental monitoring or even water and food safety.
Physics news
Scientists at the Naval Research Laboratory Plasma Physics Division demonstrate significant progress in the efficiency and cost effectiveness of light ions in the fast ignition of fusion targets. Light ions such as lithium or carbon are easier to produce technologically and the ion beam properties can be manipulated and tailored best to suit the necessary requirements for fast ignition.
(AP) -- The world's biggest particle physics lab on Tuesday played down claims of a major discovery, after a leaked memo hinting that the elusive Higgs boson - or 'God particle' - may have been found ricocheted around science websites.
When it comes to dreaming about diamonds, energy efficiency and powerful information processing aren't normally the thoughts that spring to mind. Unless, of course, you are a quantum physicist looking to create the most secure and powerful networks around.
(PhysOrg.com) -- The power and resolution of lens-based optical microscopes have improved by orders of magnitude since their invention around 1595. Nevertheless, relying on a high-magnification lens for image clarity has limitations that become more relevant as larger and larger sample volumes need to be viewed. Moreover, achieving these advances in lens-based optical microscopy has increased their size and complexity. At the same time, microfluidic systems are becoming increasingly sophisticated while decreasing in size, creating a need for miniaturized optical microscopy that can be integrated onto a lab-on-a-chip to allow simultaneous analysis and imaging of small biological samples.
Space & Earth news
In the Space Station Processing Facility at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the STS-135 crew inspects the Raffaello multi-purpose logistics module with the carrier's technician.
Planes were grounded all over Europe when the Eyjafjallajokull volcano erupted in Iceland last year. But no one knew if the no fly zone was really necessary. And the only way to find out would have been to fly a plane through the ash cloud - a potentially fatal experiment. Now a team of researchers from the University of Copenhagen and the University of Iceland have developed a protocol for rapidly providing air traffic authorities with the data they need for deciding whether or not to ground planes next time ash threatens airspace safety.
Scientists, researchers and students from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) have established contact with X-SAT, Singapore's first micro-satellite in space, and obtained a healthy communication link which ascertains that all its core systems are working normally.
The leading international organizations working to protect and manage the world's forests are calling for governments across the globe to increase communities' role in forest management. Doing so could contribute to lifting close to a billion people out of poverty, as well as improve the health and vitality of forests.
Authorities in Yangon have banned plastic bags, state media said Tuesday, in an attempt to stop non-degradable waste polluting Myanmar's main city.
Faculty from the University of Oklahoma School of Meteorology are leading the school's predictability research initiatives with multiple projects that could one day lead to more accurate forecasts of weather-related events, including landslides and tornadoes.
Indiana University scientists have found chemical flame retardants in the blood of pet dogs at concentrations five to 10 times higher than in humans, but lower than levels found in a previous study of cats.
(AP) -- Jane Poynter and seven compatriots agreed to spend two years sealed inside a 3-acre terrarium in the Sonoran Desert. Their mission back in the 1990s: To see whether humans might someday be able to create self-sustaining colonies in outer space.
Residents of a US Gulf town have been told to stay indoors and turn off their air conditioners after power failures at a nearby BP refinery and Dow Chemical plant, officials have said.
Less than half of Europe's top 300 firms are publishing full and verified carbon emission data, with French and Swiss companies ranking worst at greenhouse gas reporting, a study showed Tuesday.
While a test of SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft docking capabilities with the International Space Station is tentatively scheduled for December, 2011, Russia has said it will not allow a SpaceX vehicle to dock with the ISS unless its safety is fully tested. “We will not issue docking permission unless the necessary level of reliability and safety is proven,” said Alexei Krasov, head of the human spaceflight department of Roscosmos. “So far we have no proof that those spacecraft duly comply with the accepted norms of spaceflight safety.”
Subaru Telescope research team led by Dr. Masatoshi Imanishi at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan sampled many infrared bright, merging galaxies and determined the presence of active supermassive black holes (SMBH) deeply buried in their centers.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Thousands of K-12 students will be paying close attention when NASA's space shuttle Endeavour rumbles off the launch pad April 29 from Florida on its final flight, which will be toting a payload containing spiders, flies and seeds as part of a national educational effort spearheaded by the University of Colorado Boulder.
(AP) -- The astronaut husband of wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords arrived at NASA's launch site Tuesday for this week's flight of space shuttle Endeavour, and said his wife would be following him "pretty soon" - in plenty of time for liftoff.
Rapid increases in greenhouse gases have happened more frequently in the Earth’s history than previously realized, according to a Scripps Institution of Oceanography-led study published in the journal Nature.
Is the recently discovered “winking” asteroid – GP59 – really the missing panel from the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission? According to the latest internet buzz, it could be as possible as Mars being as large as the full Moon…
(AP) -- The astronaut husband of wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords arrived at NASA's launch site Tuesday for this week's flight of space shuttle Endeavour, and said his wife would be following him "pretty soon" - in plenty of time for liftoff.
(AP) -- Space shuttle Endeavour's commander, Mark Kelly, has spent his entire military career considering the options, weighing the risks, making a decision, then forging ahead.
A low pressure area currently over northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin has created conditions that call for a forecast of severe weather in the eastern third of the U.S. today and one area is even labeled "high risk." The GOES-13 Satellite captured a visible image of the system today as daytime heating was boiling up strong and severe thunderstorms.
Set your alarm clocks for an early treat about a half an hour before sunrise on Thursday April 28 through Sunday, May 1, 2011, as there will be a planetary delight in store! Go out and with either a pair of binoculars, a small telescope, or just use your naked eyes and find an unobscured view of the Eastern horizon to see a conjunction (objects near each other in the sky) of the planets Jupiter, Mars, Venus and Mercury, below and to the left of the thin crescent moon.
(PhysOrg.com) -- SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence group that has been using radio telescopes since the 1960’s to "listen" for signals from deep space that could prove the existence of other life in the universe, has had to temporarily suspend operation of its Allen Telescope Array, (ATA) due to a lack of funding.
(PhysOrg.com) -- In a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a group of researchers and scientists show that the gains that have been made in stabilizing CO2 emissions in developed or "rich" countries since the signing of the Kyoto agreement, have been neutralized by the increase in CO2 emissions from developing nations as they produce goods for trade, primarily to developed countries. Because of this disparity, many groups are calling for a change to the Kyoto agreement practice of only counting CO2 emissions that are produced in-country, rather than the CO2 footprint of those products that are consumed.
Years before the space shuttle would glide home to a safe touchdown on runways in California and Florida, astronauts pitched the noses of T-38 jet trainers toward the same runways to find out what it would look like to land a spacecraft in such a way.
Precipitation and runoff in California's major river basin will not fall dramatically with climate change, according to a new federal study that shows rising temperatures will have an uneven effect on the West's water supplies.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Astronomers may now know the cause of an historic supernova explosion that is an important type of object for investigating dark energy in the universe. The discovery, made using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, also provides strong evidence that a star can survive the explosive impact generated when a companion star goes supernova.
Exotic bacteria that do not rely on oxygen may have played an important role in determining the composition of Earth's early atmosphere, according to a theory that UChicago researcher Albert Colman is testing in the scalding hot springs of a volcanic crater in Siberia.
Chemistry news
Water molecules surround the genetic material DNA in a very specific way. German scientists at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) have discovered that, on the one hand, the texture of this hydration shell depends on the water content and, on the other hand, actually influences the structure of the genetic substance itself. These findings are not only important in understanding the biological function of DNA; they could also be used for the construction of new DNA-based materials.
Structural biologists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) in collaboration with colleagues at Emory University have determined the molecular structure of a key portion, or subunit, of a receptor type commonly expressed in brain cells. The receptor is one of several NMDA (N-methyl-D-aspartate) receptor variants, and the subunit in question is that which specifically binds with excitatory neurotransmitters, most notably glutamate, the brain's most prevalent excitatory neurotransmitter.
(PhysOrg.com) -- “What we are trying to do is put different pieces of a puzzle together,” said Argonne National Laboratory scientist Daniel P. Abraham. The puzzle is a lithium-rich compound material, Li1.2Co0.4Mn0.4O2, that holds key insights into the development of more powerful and robust batteries for electric cars. Using a suite of advanced techniques, including the resources of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Photon Source at Argonne, Abraham and his colleagues have pieced together both the long-range and local structure of this compound, devising a model that could explain how such materials operate on the electrochemical level — and how to use them to build a better battery.
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