In an important new study, world-renowned economists–including a Nobel Prize winner and a MacArthur “genius”–argue that when demand for a good is inelastic, the cost of making consumption illegal exceeds the gain. Their forthcoming paper in the Journal of Political Economy is a definitive explanation of the economics of illegal goods and a thoughtful explication of the costs of enforcement.
The authors demonstrate how the elasticity of demand is crucial to understanding the effects of p
’Smart’ Energy Devices and Real-time Pricing Information Enable Increased Options for Consumers, Bringing Power to the People
SEATTLE – Pacific Northwest National Laboratory announced today the launch of the Pacific Northwest GridWiseTM Demonstration projects, a regional initiative to test and speed adoption of new smart grid technologies that can make the power grid more resilient and efficient.
Senator Patty Murray, D-Wash., representatives from the Department of Energy,
Warmer temperatures enhance growth conditions of fatal fungus
Results of a new study provide the first clear proof that global warming is causing outbreaks of an infectious disease that is wiping out entire frog populations and driving many species to extinction.
Published in the Jan. 12 issue of the journal Nature, the study reveals how the warming may alter the dynamics of a skin fungus that is fatal to amphibians. The climate-driven fungal disease, the author
Team improves infinitesimal rings for speedy, reliable, efficient magnetic memory
Imagine a computer that doesn’t lose data even in a sudden power outage, or a coin-sized hard drive that could store 100 or more movies.
Magnetic random-access memory, or MRAM, could make these possible, and would also offer numerous other advantages. It would, for instance, operate at much faster than the speed of ordinary memory but consume 99 percent less energy.
The
An approach to treating intestine cancer is being developed by Russian researchers from the Bioengineering Centre, Russian Academy of Sciences, under Anna Prokhorchuk’s guidance jointly with American colleagues sponsored by the international CRDF foundation and the Federal Agency for Science and Innovation (Rosnauka).
Any cancerous disease changes the genetic landscape – some genes are suppressed, others get activated, which results in tumour growth, the formation of metastases, and can
Not long ago, the biochemist’s main tool was a chromatograph or an electrophoresis plant, but now specialists in bio-informatics use special software to simulate biochemical processes and the behaviour of complex molecules.
This approach was used to research factitious proteins of the cytochrome P450 family by researchers from the V.N. Orekhovich Research Institute of Biomedical Chemistry, Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, guided by A.V. Lisitsa, Ph.D. (Biology), and their colle
The GIOVE-A satellite is in good health and started transmitting the first Galileo signals from medium Earth orbit on 12 January.
GIOVE-A was placed in orbit (altitude 23,260 km) by a Soyuz-Fregat rocket operated by Starsem on 28 December last from the Baikonur cosmodrome. The prime contractor, Surrey Satellite Technology Limited, then successfully deployed the 7-metre solar array panels, commissioned the satellite platform and prepared the payload for tests from its Mission Contro
Chemistry teams from two universities – Lomonosov Moscow State University and Texas A&M University (USA) have improved the efficacy of pharmaceutical substance synthesis by simplifying the process. The Russian team is guided by Academician Irina Beletskaya, and the US team by Professor David Edward Bergbreiter. These two teams play on the same side because the nanoreactor concept they are using will in the long run allow to simplify in many respects chemical and pharmaceutical technology and, mo
Scientists around the world eagerly await the arrival of sample particles from Comet Wild 2, which are being brought back to Earth by the US Stardust spacecraft on 15 January this year.
The NASA Stardust mission was launched over seven years ago and has travelled several thousand millions of kilometres in deep space, chasing Comet Wild 2.
In January 2004, the spacecraft encountered the comet to collect samples of particles ejected from its nucleus.
This was ac
Following three months of around-the-clock work, the Chesapeake Bay Impact Crater Deep Drilling Project successfully completed its operations, extracting more than a mile-long segment of rocks and sediments from the Earth. On Dec. 4, the drill bit reached a final depth of 5,795 ft (1.1 miles, 1.77 kilometers) within the structure of the crater.
The impact crater was formed about 35 million years ago when a rock from space struck the Earth at hypersonic speed. Scientists have only recently
New evidence that VIRGOHI 21, a mysterious cloud of hydrogen in the Virgo Cluster 50 million light-years from the Earth, is a Dark Galaxy, emitting no star light, was presented today at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington, D. C. by an international team led by astronomers from the National Science Foundation’s Arecibo Observatory and from Cardiff University in the United Kingdom. Their results not only indicate the presence of a dark galaxy but also explain the long-standing mys
Research published in the recent issue of Ethology has discovered that men are able to potentially use smell as a mechanism to establish when their current or prospective sexual partners are at their most fertile.
Females of a number of primate species display their fertile period by behavioural and/or morphological changes. The prevalent opinion was that there are no noticeable changes in humans across the cycle. Havlícek et al, however, have found that women’s axillary odour is ass
One in five patients taking diuretics commonly prescribed for high blood pressure or heart conditions end up with reduced sodium and potassium levels, according to a study published in the January issue of the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology.
But as few as a third of patients on the drugs have their electrolyte levels tested — despite the fact that reduced levels can lead to a wide range of health problems.
A team from The University of Nottingham and Queen’s M
Every year in the European Union there are over 9,000 deaths and 200,000 injured victims in road accidents in which pedestrians and cyclists collide with a car. Hoping to improve on these grim statistics, is a cutting-edge sensing system that could ultimately help to save the lives of vulnerable road users (VRUs).
“The concept is relatively straightforward,” explains Dr Marc-Michael Meinecke of Volkswagen, one of the chief partners in the SAVE-U project along with DaimlerChrysle
A flotilla of space-weather satellites – ESA’s Cluster and NASA’s ACE and Wind – observed for the first time steady large-scale jets of charged particles in the solar wind between the Sun and Earth.
When such huge jets of particles impact on Earth’s magnetic shield, they could cause powerful magnetic storms on our planet. Understanding the mechanism behind these phenomena – called ‘magnetic reconnection’ – is also fundamental to many explosive phenomena, such as solar flares, p
Swansea University ecologist Dr Patricia Lee has won a British Ecological Society (BES) grant to unlock the secrets of the millions of eggs held in museum collections worldwide.
The bird collection at London’s Natural History Museum alone includes more than a million skins and eggs, collected over the past 200 years and representing 95% of all known bird species. While the skins have proved a good source of DNA and have been widely used by scientists to study many aspects of b
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