The U.S. Department of Energy’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program is placing a new, portable atmospheric laboratory with sophisticated instruments and data systems in Niger, Africa, to gain a better understanding of the potential impacts of Saharan dust on global climate.
Dust from Africa’s Sahara desert–the largest source of dust on the planet–reaches halfway around the globe. Carried by winds and clouds, the dust travels through West African, Mediterranean,
A transportation engineer at The University of Texas at Austin has performed one of the most comprehensive surveys of physical activity in children and found that about as many kids stay active by pedaling their bikes to a friend’s house or walking around a neighborhood as do others by participating in organized athletics.
“This is a compelling reminder that parents really don’t need to think of staying fit as a huge and scheduled time sink,” said Dr. Chandra Bhat.
An electrical engineer at the University of Texas at Austin has made a laser light blink while passing through a miniaturized silicon chip, a major step toward developing commercially viable optical interconnects for high performance computers and other devices.
Researchers for decades have sought to harness light as a messenger on silicon chips because light can move thousands of times faster through solid materials than electrons and can carry more information at once, while re
A new method for exploring the secrets of Mother Nature’s frustrations has been developed by a team of physicists lead by Penn State University professors Peter Schiffer, Vincent Crespi, and Nitin Samarth. The research, which will be published this week in the journal Nature, is is an important contribution to the study of complex interacting systems, and it also could contribute to technologies for advanced magnetic-recording devices.
“We all would prefer to have less perso
We might not be able to resist a pretty face after all, according to a report from the University of Pennsylvania. Experiments in which subjects were given a fraction of a second to judge “attractiveness” offered further evidence that our preference for beauty might be hard-wired. People who participated in the studies were also more likely to associate pretty faces with positive traits.
“We’re able to judge attractiveness with surprising speed and on the basis of very little inf
An unusual pool of scientific talent at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, combined with new nanofabrication and nanocharacterization instruments, is helping to open a new frontier in electronics, to be made up of very small and very fast devices.
A new discovery by this group opens a path to new computer technologies and related devices, and could drive entire industries into the future, the researchers say.
The researchers learned that
New research published this week on the evolution of volcanoes sheds light on what lies deep beneath the Earth’s surface. The research, published in Nature, suggests that the plume of hot material that provides Hawaii’s volcanoes with its continuous supply of molten lava originates from a depth of almost 3000 km, at the border between the Earth’s core and its rocky mantle. This is far deeper than had been thought possible by many scientists.
Plumes are hot, narrow currents
The University of Hertfordshire has taken the robot out of the laboratory and has it living in a house nearby as part of a study of human-robot interaction.
The study, which will be broadcast on the BBC Three Counties’ John Pilgrim Show, on Wednesday 25 January as part of a two-hour feature on the University, aims to research how humans can comfortably interact with robots.
Mick Walters, a researcher in the University’s School of Computer Science will describe the Schoo
A new paper examines galaxy rotation curves without exotic dark matter and seeks to describe a modified Newtonian acceleration law derived from a relativistic modification of Einstein’s gravitational theory. Details are available in the January 10th, 2006, edition of The Astrophysical Journal 636, pp. 721-741.
The study is entitled “Galaxy Rotation Curves Without Non-Baryonic Dark Matter” and is co-authored by John Moffat, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, and Joel Brownstein,
Manchester scientists studying global warming are predicting a much lower rise in sea levels than previously feared.
Researchers say melting glaciers and ice caps will cause just a 0.1m rise in global sea levels by 2100 – less than half the increase of several earlier predictions.
But they show that melting of glacial and mountain areas is accelerating fast leading to flooding and land slides in mountainous regions such as Nepal.
Dr Sarah Raper, a climatologist fro
Women in Britain are happier with ‘non-traditional’ domestic arrangements, according to new Economic and Social Research Council funded research at City University. ‘Our findings contradict Neo-Conservative claims that women would be happier if they went back to being traditional housewives,’ says Professor Rosemary Crompton, who led the research. ‘The recipe for personal happiness, satisfaction with the family and lower stress at home seems to be a combination of liberal attitudes to work outsid
The Technical University of Denmark (DTU) is to receive the world’s most powerful microscope. The gift, amounting to almost 100 million Danish kroner, from The A. P. Møller and Chastine Mc-Kinney Møller Foundation will make it possible for DTU, in collaboration with a world leading supplier of microscopes, to develop a so-called Environmental Transmission Electron Microscope, which is five times more powerful than similar research microscopes currently in operation.
The gift fro
The New Year got off to a multimedia start for the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), with the public launch of its new image DVD “Discovering, Funding, Growing”, presented on 16 January 2006 in Berlin. The DVD contains a 20-minute film as well as an interactive multimedia DVD-ROM section, which can be viewed on any computer. It complements the DFG’s existing range of publications and is intended both for members of the general public who have an interest in scien
A major community eye screening programme to monitor the sight of 12,000 diabetes patients across Central Lancashire over a 12 month period has scored a world first in using secure messaging telemedicine to successfully transfer patient information between opticians, hospitals and a screening administration centre within the PCTs. The diabetic retinopathy screening programme is using OptoMize, an innovative software product combining digital images of the retina with an electronic patient adm
Training your mind might be just as effective as working your muscles to treat chronic lower back pain. A study published today in the open access journal BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders shows that therapy that helps chronic back pain sufferers overcome the psychological challenges associated with the pain is as effective as treatment that aims to restore back muscle strength and physical ability. Surprisingly, combining both psychological and physical treatments is not more effective than using th
An organism widely used for genetics-versus-environment studies has joined the panoply of mice, rats, dogs, humans and other species whose entire genomes have been sequenced.
At the Daphnia Genomics Consortium’s annual meeting in Bloomington this week, Indiana University and Joint Genome Institute scientists announced they’ve completed a “shotgun” sequence for Daphnia pulex, or the water flea, as it’s better known to high school biology students.
“Daphn
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