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Other Sciences news
Want to pick up some steak for dinner along with a cute pair of shoes and a new flat-screen TV? Growing consumer demand for convenience is the driving force behind changes to the grocery retailing sector over the past decade, according to a report by researchers at the Ryerson University Centre for the Study of Commercial Activity (CSCA).
Why isn't knowledge transfer happening more often in companies spending money on it?
It's the year 1800. You're a slave in southeast Virginia. You manage to escape. Your freedom is only going to last as long as you can hide. Where do you go?
South Korea on Monday announced sites for its $4.76 billion "science belt" designed to help Asia's fourth-largest economy take the lead in cutting-edge technologies.
British scientist Stephen Hawking has branded heaven a "fairy story" for people afraid of the dark, in his latest dismissal of the concepts underpinning the world's religions.
A three-year international research project, directed by two academics at the University of Oxford, finds that humans have natural tendencies to believe in gods and an afterlife.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Historians from the University of Glasgow have found evidence to show that, as far as the English were concerned, Scots patriot and hero William Wallace aspired to be King of Scotland.
The visual power of a brand can be the first breakthrough companies make with their customers. But efforts to artistically manipulate the typeface of a corporate logo can backfire for firms, according to a Boston College researcher.
Schools must revamp how they teach about the environment to prevent ecological collapse, conservationist Charles Saylan and UCLA life scientist Daniel T. Blumstein argue in "The Failure of Environmental Education (And How We Can Fix It)," published this week by the University of California Press.
Scientists have found that our cousins the Neanderthal employed sophisticated hunting strategies similar to the tactics used much later by modern humans. The new findings come from the analysis of subtle chemical variations in reindeer teeth.
A pattern of earthen berms, spread across a northern peninsula of the big island of Hawaii, is providing archeologists with clues to exactly how residents farmed in paradise long before Europeans arrived at the islands.
Physical anthropologist Chris Kirk has announced the discovery of a previously unknown species of fossil primate, Mescalerolemur horneri, in the Devil's Graveyard badlands of West Texas.
These days a bad credit score will get you turned away by a bank, but if you tell a good story about that score, you can improve your chances of getting a microloan from a peer-to-peer lender, according to new research from Rice University and the University of Delaware.
Nanotechnology news
On May 13 2011, the journal Science published a paper where scientists from Risoe DTU (Denmark), in collaboration with scientists from China and the USA, report a new method for revealing a 3-D picture of the structure inside a material.
EU-funded researchers from Germany and Poland have made some groundbreaking discoveries about cell cytoplasm viscosity, which could further our knowledge of the cytoplasm of cancer cells.
Researchers at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences have outlined a method for storing programs inside DNA that simplifies nanocomputing—computation at the molecular level. Co-authored by Jessie Chang and Dennis Shasha, Stored Clocked Programs Inside DNA: A Simplifying Framework for Nanocomputing (Morgan and Claypool) describes how to build millions of DNA programs from which instructions can be peeled away one at a time from each program in synchrony.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers at Hewlett Packard and the University of California, Santa Barbara, have analysed in unprecedented detail the physical and chemical properties of an electronic device that computer engineers hope will transform computing.
Physics news
(PhysOrg.com) -- Bubbles are blocking the current path of one of the most promising high temperature superconducting materials, new research suggests.
(PhysOrg.com) -- "Human beings are more or less like a computer," Jian-Jun Shu tells PhysOrg.com. "We do computing work, and our DNA can be used in computing operations." Shu is a professor at the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the Nanyang Technical University in Singapore. "For some problems, DNA-based computing could replace silicon-based computing, offering many advantages."
Space & Earth news
The European Space Agency's Paolo Nespoli took this image of lightning over Brazil as seen from the International Space Station in January 2011.
The research aircraft Polar 5 of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association returned to Bremerhaven from a six-week expedition in the high Arctic on May 6. Joint flights with aircraft of the European and American space agencies (ESA and NASA) were a novelty in sea ice research: Simultaneous measurements with a large number of sensors on three planes underneath the CryoSat-2 satellite led to unique data records. Furthermore, the international team composed of 25 scientists and engineers collected data on trace gases, aerosols and meteorological parameters that will be evaluated at the research institutes involved in the coming months.
(PhysOrg.com) -- One of the most powerful and ambitious astronomical satellites designed to provide the best view yet of the Universe at far-infrared and sub-millimeter wavelengths is living up to its illustrious name, according to Cardiff astronomers.
The Herschel Space Observatory has been observing the sky at infrared wavelengths since shortly after its launch two years ago, on 14th May 2009. But the name Herschel has a much longer legacy than that. The observatory is named after Sir William Herschel, a leading astronomer, for discovering infrared light around two hundred years ago. The Herschel family was a particularly astronomical one, with both his sister, Caroline, and son, John, playing important roles in the history of astronomy.
A wildfire engulfed the town of Slave Lake in western Canada, forcing the evacuation of its 7,000 residents at the start of the forest fire season, authorities said Monday.
A University of Oklahoma environmental science graduate student will travel to Ethiopia in June to test materials she has been investigating as possible solutions to fluorosis—a widespread problem in the Rift Valley, where high levels of fluoride in the drinking water result in dental and skeletal disease.
University of Queensland researchers believe that long term population projections have a key role in informing policy in contrast with the government's population strategy released yesterday.
(PhysOrg.com) -- An Air Force C-17 transport plane delivered the heat shield, back shell and cruise stage of the Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft to NASA's Kennedy Space Center, Fla., on May 12, 2011.
(PhysOrg.com) -- UC Berkeley is searching for evidence of intelligent life on planets identified by the Kepler space telescope team as having Earth-like environments. This search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) uses the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and targets 86 stars with possible planetary systems.
A new movie from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory shows a sequence of Chandra images of the Crab Nebula, taken over an interval of seven months. Dramatic variations are seen, including the expansion of a ring of X-ray emission around the pulsar (white dot near center) and changes in the knots within this ring.
Scientists said on Monday a rocky world orbiting a nearby star was confirmed as the first planet outside our solar system to meet key requirements for sustaining life.
With an increasingly warmer climate, there is a trend for springs to arrive earlier and summers to be hotter. Since spring and summer are the prime growing seasons for plants—when flowers bloom and trees increase in girth and height—do these climate changes mean greater seasonal growth for plants? This is a critical question for forest management, especially in the boreal region—an area particularly sensitive to the effects of climate change.
(AP) -- The six experienced astronauts making space shuttle Endeavour's final voyage are as tight as brothers after nearly two years together as a crew and the tragic shooting of the commander's congresswoman wife.
Engineers at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center gave a key component of the J-2X engine a brisk workout to ensure it can withstand its extreme operating environment. The engine's fuel turbopump first stage nozzle passed the test, performing even better than expected.
How can the exploration of a Canadian lake, using deep-water submersibles, help NASA plan for the human exploration of Mars?
NASA recently selected 20 small satellites to fly as auxiliary cargo aboard rockets that are planned to launch in 2011 and 2012.
The Sloan Low-mass Wide Pairs of Kinematically Equivalent Stars (SLoWPoKES) catalog was recently announced, containing 1,342 common proper motion pairs (i.e. binaries) – which are all low mass stars in the mid-K and mid-M stellar classes – in other words, orange and red dwarves.
Star formation is an incredible process, but also notoriously difficult to trace. The reason is that the main constituent of stars, hydrogen, looks about the same well before a gravitational collapse begins, as it does in the dense clouds where star formation happens. Sure, the temperature changes and the hydrogen glows in a different part of the spectrum, but it’s still hydrogen. It’s everywhere!
The majority of seaports around the world are unprepared for the potentially damaging impacts of climate change in the coming century, according to a new Stanford University study.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers from Canada studying the highly salty coastal lagoons at Los Roques, Venezuela and the microbial mats found at the bottom of the sea there, have discovered that oxygen levels in the mats, at least in the day time, are high enough to support the development of mobile life forms. Led by University of Alberta palaeontologist, Murray Gingras, the team writes in Nature Geoscience, that levels of oxygen on the ocean floor were up to four times as high as that near the surface; high enough to support the development of mobile sea life; which the team believes could explain how early life forms could have evolved in waters with high salt concentrations.
Endeavour blasted off on NASA's next-to-last shuttle flight, thundering through clouds into orbit Monday morning as the mission commander's wounded wife, Gabrielle Giffords, watched along with an exhilarated crowd estimated in the hundreds of thousands.
(PhysOrg.com) -- The Great Nebula in the constellation of Carina is a massive star-forming complex located about 7.5 thousand light-years away. The main star in the complex, Eta Carinae, shines brightly in the southern sky. Its ensemble of stellar clusters are young and hot, with ages that range from less than about one million years to about six million years. Altogether, the region contains one of the richest concentrations of massive young stars in the galaxy. In addition, the region is rich in non-stellar material including filaments, pillars, cavities, arcs, and other features indicative of a turbulent and complex history.
Cigarette smoking, forest fires and woodburning can release a chemical that may be at least partly responsible for human health problems related to smoke exposure, according to a new study by NOAA researchers and their colleagues.
Scientists from Queen's and Carleton universities head a national multidisciplinary research team that has uncovered startling new evidence of the destructive impact of global climate change on North America's largest Arctic delta.
Chemistry news
A breath test for "sniffing out" cancer in a person's breath is a step closer to reality, according to a study recently published in the British Journal of Cancer. The study results show that the device developed by Prof. Hossam Haick of the Technion Department of Chemical Engineering and the Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute can identify chemical signals in the breath of cancer patients even those with difficult-to-detect head-and-neck cancer.
Many plastic products contain hazardous chemicals that can leach to the surroundings. In studies conducted at the University of Gothenburg, a third of the tested plastic products released toxic substances, including 5 out of 13 products intended for children.
(PhysOrg.com) -- An international team, of scientists, led by a team at Monash University has found the key to the hydrogen economy could come from a very simple mineral, commonly seen as a black stain on rocks.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have developed a super-resolution microscopy technique that is answering long-held questions about exactly how and why a cell's defenses fail against some invaders, such as plague, while successfully fending off others like E.coli. The approach is revealing never-before-seen detail of the cell membrane, which could open doors to new diagnostic, prevention and treatment techniques.
Provided by PhysOrg.com
