Culture vultures enjoy exploring museum collections online. New 3D technology promises to make their experience richer still. With a mouse click, people can manipulate valuable objects as if they were in their own hands.
“As far as I know, no European museums offer 3D presentations of their prized treasures,” says Martin White, coordinator of the IST project ARCO. “Their websites are mostly just a catalogue of what they own or are exhibiting. But with our software, a museum can e
The University of Surrey was pleased to host the seminar ‘The Older Workforce: an untapped resource’ yesterday evening. The seminar, supported by the Centre for Research into the Older Workforce (CROW) at UniS and The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), examined both business and individual attitudes to older workers.
In all industrialised countries the population is ageing and we have more people retired than ever before, while the workforce is shrinking. This
Nearly as many women who received only one embryo at a time gave birth as women who received two embryos. At the same time the risk of giving birth to twins is minimized. These are the findings of a major study from the Sahlgrenska Academy, at Göteborg University in Sweden.
In-vitro fertilization, IVF, is a successful method to help childless couples to become parents. To maximize the chance of pregnancy, physicians have generally reintroduced more than one embryo. This has led to
St. Jude study shows three-week treatment with methylphenidate led to significant improvement of attention and behavior problems due to central nervous system exposure to radiation, chemotherapy
Children who suffer from behavioral and learning problems after their central nervous systems have been exposed to chemotherapy or radiation appear to benefit from treatment with methylphenidate (MPH), the drug commonly known by the brand name Ritalin®. This finding, from investigators a
International network reaches 1,500th float deployment-halfway to full array
Note: This news release is issued in conjunction with the Group on Earth Observations (GEO-5) and the Partnership for Observation of the Global Oceans (POGO-6) international meetings held the week of Nov. 29, 2004.
Scientists have crossed an important threshold in an international effort to deploy a global network of robotic instruments to monitor and investigate important changes in the world’s oc
A recent study of 43 garden crops led by a University of Texas at Austin biochemist suggests that their nutrient value has declined in recent decades while farmers have been planting crops designed to improve other traits.
The study was designed to investigate the effects of modern agricultural methods on the nutrient content of foods. The researchers chose garden crops, mostly vegetables, but also melons and strawberries, for which nutritional data were available from both 1950
Early identification of potential stress fractures with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can reduce the threat of season-ending injuries for college basketball players, according to a Duke University Medical Center radiologist.
The findings — based on the study of 26 male college basketball players — suggest that such diagnostic work should perhaps be included as a standard part of physical examinations for male and female basketball players, who regularly place considerable
With increasing global warming Rudolph and the rest of Santa Claus’ reindeer will disappear from large portions of their current range and be under severe environmental stress by the end of the century.
That finding comes from a new study that examined the archaeological record in southwestern France, where reindeer became locally extinct during two earlier episodes of warming roughly 10,000 and 130,000 years ago.
“There will be a direct impact of increases in su
Molecular beacons, gene silencing, and reporter genes studied to better predict response to chemotherapy
Researchers at the Abramson Cancer Center of the University of Pennsylvania are applying a host of imaging techniques to develop better ways to look noninvasively at the molecular characteristics of tumors. The experiments, now in human cell cultures and mouse models, are aimed at better forecasting early response to chemotherapy so that treatment choices can be adjusted.
We are admonished not to gain weight during winter’s two big eating holidays — but might a little temporary fat actually strengthen our immune systems?
Indiana University Bloomington assistant professor and biologist Gregory Demas is studying the relationship between fat reserves and immune function in animal models.
So far, Demas has found that sudden weight loss leads to the rapid depression of immune function, and he says the opposite also holds true: an increase in fat
Concerns about greenhouse gases and global warming are getting scientists to think in unconventional ways about how to stem the carbon dioxide tide. Indiana University Bloomington geologist Chen Zhu is trying to determine if — and how — a new strategy known as “carbon sequestration” can work.
Zhu and other scientists believe it may be possible to grab carbon dioxide before it shoots out of power plant smokestacks, diverting it to geological carbon sinks that trap carbon dioxide foreve
Biologists at the University of California, San Diego have identified a gene that appears to have been a critical trait in allowing the earliest plant breeders 7,000 years ago to transform teosinte, a wild grass that grows in the Mexican Sierra Madre, into maize, the world’s third most planted crop after rice and wheat.
In a paper that appears in the December 2 issue of the journal Nature, the scientists report their discovery of a gene that regulates the development of seco
A complex farming society developed in Uruguay around 4,800 to 4,200 years ago, much earlier that previously thought, Iriarte and his colleagues report in this week’s Nature (December 2). Researchers had assumed that the large rivers system called the La Plata Basin was inhabited by simple groups of hunters and gatherers for much of the pre-Hispanic era.
Iriarte and coauthors excavated an extensive mound complex, called Los Ajos, in the wetlands of southeastern Uruguay. They
A practical method for automatically correcting data-handling errors in quantum computers has been developed and demonstrated by physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
Described in the Dec. 2, 2004, issue of the journal Nature, the NIST work is the first demonstration of all the steps of error correction for quantum computers, a futuristic, potentially very powerful form of computing that uses the quantum properties of atoms or other particles as
New evidence suggests that a promising investigational treatment for patients with damaged hearts — using adult stem cells to regenerate heart tissue — may not work as planned. In the December 2004 issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, researchers from the University of Chicago show that although stem cells derived from bone marrow can find their way to areas of damaged heart muscle, infiltrate into these regions and proliferate, they do not mature into new cardiac muscle cells.
Close encounter may explain some objects beyond Neptune
Computer simulations show a close encounter with a passing star about 4 billion years ago may have given our solar system its abrupt edge and put small, alien worlds into distant orbits around our sun.
The study, which used a supercomputer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., was published in the Dec. 2 issue of the journal Nature by physicist Ben Bromley of the University of Utah and astron
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