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Other Sciences news
Russian maths genius Grigori Perelman, who famously turned down a $1 million prize last year, now appears to be refusing free eye surgery for his mother.
Florida was again one of the country’s leaders in population growth in the last decade, but the growth rates over the past few years have been among the lowest in the state’s history, according to a new study by the University of Florida.
Racial bias may contribute to the overrepresentation of African-American children in the child welfare system, a new study says.
Every year, Nordicom at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden takes a barometer reading of media use in Sweden. Media Barometer data were first collected in 1979. These are some of the findings of the 2010 survey.
Since the World Wide Web emerged in the mid 1990s scientists have dreamed of having the whole body of scientific peer reviewed literature freely available on the web, openly available without any hindrance. In the "Open Access" scenario each published article is just one mouse-click away from any reader worldwide, a model which is in sharp contrast to the established subscription system (whereby access is only provided to those people who are able to pay for an annual subscription), 'Open Access' removes any barriers to what many believe should be publicly available material and in addition, provides for full use and re-use of the published output (hence facilitating developments such as data mining of knowledge discovery).
(PhysOrg.com) -- A three-year evaluation of After School Matters -- a Chicago after-school program that serves more than 17,000 students and is a model for high school after-school programs in cities around the country -- suggests that well implemented, apprenticeship-style programs help reduce problem behavior in high school aged youth.
Evidence of beer making in Mediterranean France, as far back as the 5th century BC, has been unearthed by Laurent Bouby from the CNRS - Centre de Bio-Archeologie et d'Ecology in Montepellier, France, and colleagues. Their analyses at the Roquepertuse excavation site in Provence reveal the presence of poorly preserved barley grains suggesting germination, as well as equipment and other remains of deliberate malting in the home. Taken together, these findings suggest that, as well as regular wine making, the French had an early passion for beer brewing. The work has just been published online in Springer's journal Human Ecology.
Hebrew University of Jerusalem researchers have conducted an initial survey of what appears to be an important, ancient water source in a cave that was been discovered during excavation work for a new train station being constructed at the entrance to Jerusalem.
“All glass is beautiful,” Belgian researcher Patrick Degryse said, gently turning a delicate, Roman-era vessel, its bluish sheen glowing under the fluorescent lights of the Semitic Museum’s basement collections.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Wondering why humans are the only species on the planet that cooperates with large numbers of others that they don’t know, anthropologists Sarah Mathew and Robert Boyd, professors at UCLA, looked to the Turkana, an East African group whose survival depends on pasturing animals, for answers. In their joint paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they suggest that social punishment for desertion or cowardice, doled out by the rest of the community after raids on other groups in attempts to steal livestock, served to both cause others to sign on, and then to cooperate appropriately in the raids, thus providing rewards for the whole group.
Nanotechnology news
(PhysOrg.com) -- Tiny fibres used to strengthen items such as bike frames and hockey sticks could pose risks to workers who make them.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Nanoparticles of the right dimensions and shape may be the key in combating the plaque that destroys neurons and leads to symptoms associated with Alzheimer's disease, a new report shows.
(PhysOrg.com) -- A nanoscale grapevine with hydrogen grapes could someday provide your car's preferred vintage of fuel.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Cardiff University research may help to improve the way that metal nanoparticles are used in catalysis – the process of making chemical reactions go faster.
Physics news
From drawings to computer animation, the magic of cartoon movies allows audiences to explore a fantastical and imaginary world. To make animated characters life-like on the big-screen, the laws of physics have to be taken into account by film makers. To be believable, every character's movements have to have the fundamentals of physics supporting them. If film makers incorporate scientific principles in the creation of the animated movie, audiences can escape reality and enter a fantasy world.
Key to the astronomical modeling process by which scientists attempt to understand our universe, is a comprehensive knowledge of the values making up these models. These are generally measured to exceptionally high confidence levels in laboratories. Astronomers then assume these constants are just that – constant. This generally seems to be a good assumption since models often produce mostly accurate pictures of our universe. But just to be sure, astronomers like to make sure these constants haven’t varied across space or time. Making sure, however, is a difficult challenge. Fortunately, a recent paper has suggested that we may be able to explore the fundamental masses of protons and electrons (or at least their ratio) by looking at the relatively common molecule of methanol.
(PhysOrg.com) -- "Smaller, faster, cheaper" is Silicon Valley's mantra for progress. But as critical components shrink to near atomic dimensions, it’s becoming much more difficult for their developers to understand exactly how they operate before committing to product design and manufacturing.
Quantum key distribution (QKD) is an advanced tool for secure computer-based interactions, providing confidential communication between two remote parties by enabling them to construct a shared secret key during the course of their conversation.
Using high-resolution imaging technology, University of Illinois researchers have answered a question that had confounded semiconductor researchers: Is amorphous silicon a glass? The answer? Yes – until hydrogen is added.
(PhysOrg.com) -- In the search for superconductors, finding ways to compress hydrogen into a metal has been a point of focus ever since scientists predicted many years ago that electricity would flow, uninhibited, through such a material.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Of the many exotic and counterintuitive aspects of particle and quantum physics, exciton and polariton quasiparticles are among the most interesting. An exciton forms when a photon is absorbed by a semiconductor as a Coulomb force-bound state of a (negatively-charged) electron and a (positively-charged) hole; this particle pair can be seen as an elementary excitation of condensed matter able to transport energy without the transfer of net electric charge, and moreover has size- and shape-dependent optoelectronic properties. A polariton forms due to strong coupling of a photon with an excitation of a material – and among the several types of polaritons, an exciton-polariton is a composite photonic-electronic quasiparticle resulting from coupling of visible light with matter in the form of an exciton. At the same time, the difficulty of achieving increased light-matter coupling strengths has limited the development of applications operating at, for exam! ple, higher temperatures and lower power. Recently, however, researchers produced light-matter coupling strengths in nanoscale materials at much higher levels than was previously thought possible in their bulk counterparts.
Space & Earth news
NASA's new J-2X rocket engine, which could power the upper stage of the nation's future heavy-lift launch vehicle, is ready for its first round of testing. The fully assembled engine was installed Saturday in the A-2 Test Stand at the agency's Stennis Space Center in Mississippi.
On coming Wednesday, 15 June, the research vessel Polarstern of the German Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association will set off on its 26th arctic expedition. Over 130 scientists from research institutions in six countries will take part in three legs of the voyage. First of all, at long-term stations oceanographers and biologists will investigate how oceanic currents as well as the animal and plant world are changing between Spitsbergen and Greenland. Beginning in August, physical, biological and chemical changes in the central Arctic will be recorded. RV Polarstern is expected back in Bremerhaven on 7 October.
Various biofuels, first hailed as a way to a sustainable energy supply, have since fallen out of favor because of the overall negative impact they have on the environment, mainly due to the production of the biogenic fuels – as they should be more aptly termed. Now researchers at Empa, the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, have together with their colleagues at the Swiss Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels (RSB) and the HTW Berlin, Germany, developed an online tool to assess the sustainability of biofuel production.
Soil chemistry plays an important role in the composition of surface waters. In areas with limited human activities, properties of catchment soils directly relate to the exported nutrients to surface waters. Phosphate sorption research is common in agricultural and forest soils, but data from alpine areas are limited.
(AP) -- Business, academic and environmental leaders are stressing the importance of weather satellites in an era of tight federal budgets.
(AP) -- The drifting plume of ash from Chile's erupting volcano forced new cancelations of dozens of flights on Monday in Argentina, Uruguay and other South American countries, even as airlines in Australia began trying to move a backlog of volcano-stranded passengers.
Sharply reducing emissions of soot and smog could play a critical role in preventing Earth from overheating, according to a UN report released on Tuesday.
How do you observe signs of climate change in real time? Dr. Marco Tedesco, associate professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at The City College of New York, plans to be the first to catch sight of one dramatic indicator of a warming world on the Greenland ice sheet this summer, and through social media, people will be able to track his progress.
The low pressure system called System 98A was renamed tropical depression 1A over the weekend, and its strengthening was short-lived, just as it appears on NASA satellite imagery.
Some satellite images are striking and memorable, while others are just interesting. On June 10, NASA's Aqua satellite flew over Hurricane Adrian from space and sent a stunning image to the science team at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Meanwhile a GOES-11 Satellite animation shows how and when Adrian fizzled.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Spacecraft specialists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., have been putting the Mars Science Laboratory rover, Curiosity, through various tests in preparation for shipment to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida this month.
Two mini-submarines that have filmed the wreckage of the doomed luxury cruise liner Titanic will dive into Lake Geneva to gauge its pollution levels, Swiss researchers said Tuesday.
A unique example of some of the lowest surface brightness galaxies in the universe have been found by an international team of astronomers lead by the Niels Bohr Institute. The galaxy has lower amounts of heavier elements than other known galaxies of this type. The discovery means that small low surface brightness galaxies may have more in common with the first galaxies formed shortly after the Big Bang than previously thought. The results have been published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
(AP) -- The cloud of ash spewing from Chile's erupting volcano has grounded more flights in countries from Uruguay to Australia and is threatening to delay next month's start of the Copa America football tournament in Argentina.
(PhysOrg.com) -- The far side unveiled! This is the first complete image of the solar far side, the half of the sun invisible from Earth. Captured on June 1, 2011, the composite image was assembled from NASA's two Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory (STEREO) spacecraft. STEREO-Ahead's data is shown on the left half of image and STEREO-Behind's data on the right.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Orbiting about 31 miles above the lunar surface, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft will get a "front-row seat" to the total lunar eclipse on June 15, says Noah Petro, Associate Project Scientist for LRO at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
(PhysOrg.com) -- The process of star formation, once thought to involve just the simple coalescence of material under the influence of gravity, actually entails a complex series of stages, with the youngest stars assembling circumstellar disks of material (possibly preplanetary in nature) for example. Understanding these early stages has been difficult for astronomers, in part because because they take place in nurseries heavily obscured by dust. Nevertheless, they are critically important to an understanding of how our young solar system and its planets were born and evolved.
The Gulf of Mexico's hypoxic zone is predicted to be larger than average this year, due to extreme flooding of the Mississippi River this spring, according to an annual forecast by a team of NOAA-supported scientists from the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, Louisiana State University and the University of Michigan. The forecast is based on Mississippi River nutrient inputs compiled annually by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).
(PhysOrg.com) -- Since 1611, humans have recorded the comings and goings of black spots on the sun. The number of these sunspots waxes and wanes over approximately an 11-year cycle -- more sunspots generally mean more activity and eruptions on the sun and vice versa. The number of sunspots can change from cycle to cycle, and 2008 saw the longest and weakest solar minimum since scientists have been monitoring the sun with space-based instruments.
(PhysOrg.com) -- A missing jet stream, fading spots, and slower activity near the poles say that our Sun is heading for a rest period even as it is acting up for the first time in years, according to scientists at the National Solar Observatory (NSO) and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL).
Chemistry news
Many organic molecules are non-superimposable with their mirror image. The two forms of such a molecule are called enantiomers and can have different properties in biological systems. The problem is to control which enantiomer you want to produce – a problem that has proved to be important in the pharmaceutical industry. Researchers at the University of Gothenburg have now come up with a new method to control the process.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers in the lab of Whitehead Institute Member David Sabatini have identified a new substrate of the mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) kinase, called Grb10, by using a two-pronged approach of mass spectrometry and kinase specificity profiling.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Hydrogen is under consideration as a promising energy carrier for a future sustainable energy economy. However, practicable solutions for the easy and safe storage of hydrogen are still being sought. Despite some progress, no generally applicable solutions that meet the requirements of industry have been found to date. In the journal Angewandte Chemie Matthias Beller and his team at the Leibnitz Institute for Catalysis (Rostock, Germany) have now introduced a new approach to hydrogen storage that is based on simple salts of formic acid and carbonic acid.
MIT researchers have found a new way to predict which materials will perform best as catalysts for oxygen reduction, a core process in metal air batteries and fuel cells, opening up the possibility of faster and more effective development of new high-efficiency, low-cost energy-storage technologies.
Provided by PhysOrg.com
The galaxy ESO 546G-34 is small faint and unevolved low surface brightness galaxy of dwarf-type, which makes it somewhat similar to the Small Magellanic Cloud (companion galaxy to the Milky Way) in appearance. ESO 546G-34 has an extremely low abundance of heavier elements and contains at least 50 percent gas, which also makes it similar to the small galaxies that were abundant in the early universe. Credit: ESO
