Dedication Ceremony in Tucson, Ariz., Will Unveil the World’s Most Powerful Ground-Based Telescope to an International Audience
The LBT Corporation announced today that the dedication ceremonies for the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) will be held Oct. 15. This scientific achievement will be marked by a formal dedication dinner for partners and their guests. The media is invited to attend tours of the LBT and Arizona astronomy facilities in advance of the dedication.
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Multidisciplinary teams to study animal movement, genetic links to outside world
How exactly do animals move? How do organisms adapt to newly acquired genes? What genetic forces draw members of an ecological community together? And does social behavior originate in nature, nurture or both? To tackle these and other major questions in biology, the National Science Foundation (NSF) today announced six new awards totaling nearly $30 million over five years from its Frontiers in Integrat
It started with tennis balls. As a former collegiate tennis player, Daniela Rus habitually rolls two tennis balls around in her hand as she paces her office. As a robotics researcher at Dartmouth College, she wondered why the tennis balls shouldn’t be able to roll themselves around.
She soon determined that electromagnets didn’t have enough lifting power to solve the tennis-ball problem. However, her question led to a decade-long research program into the challenges of designing robot
The way that HIV disables the body’s natural defences against retroviruses is not as well understood as recent studies suggest, according to new research published in the Open Access journal Retrovirology. Klaus Strebel and his colleagues from NIH found that the HIV encoded Vif protein does not need to destroy the enzyme APOBEC3G within infected cells to disable it. This latest finding has serious implications for the design of antivirals to fight HIV.
APOBEC3G is one of the most
Think about a piece of chocolate. Imagine it melting in your mouth. The sensation is delicious. Now think of the same image, but this time the chocolate is covered by a white film on its surface. This white film is produced when chocolate is poorly crystallised or when it is stored under the wrong conditions. We ’eat’ also with our eyes, so such bad-looking chocolate seems less nice to the palate. Here is where scientists come into the picture. Researchers from The Netherlands working at the ESRF
When earthquakes strike, people often get trapped in buildings. Search and rescue teams can pinpoint some victims using sniffer dogs and sensors. But a new European system that takes pictures during or after a building collapse promises to save many more lives.
The ‘low-cost catastrophic event capturing system’ is the fruit of the IST Loccatec project. It comprises capturing devices (small, autonomous infrared cameras) and a portable central unit for the rescue teams. The cameras – p
New research into how women view their bodies aims to challenge the as yet untested belief that thin, glamorous, perfect female models in advertising are socially desirable and “sell” products to the consumer more successfully than other body types.
The research, to be carried out by Dr Helga Dittmar, Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Sussex, with Emma Halliwell, from the University of the West of England, will also look at precisely how – and why – ultra-thin media
Infectious disease epidemics are causing widespread and alarming declines in reef-building coral species, the foundation blocks of coral reef ecosystems. The emergence of these diseases has occurred simultaneously with large increases in the abundance of seaweeds, called macroalgae.
Macroalgae frequently interact with corals, usually by overgrowing them from their edges. In the October issue of Ecology Letters, Nugues, Smith, van Hooidonk, Seabra and Bak demonstrate a sinister asp
Research funded by the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation focuses on 108 genes
The study, involving the seven Consortium laboratories, characterized the changes in gene expression at the site of, as well as above and below, a moderate contusion injury in rats. The project involved 108 GeneChips and looked at four time points, spanning from three hours after injury to a more “chronic” state 35 days later. The data analysis produced a spatial and temporal profile of spinal cord in
A new study by researchers at Joslin Diabetes Center sheds light on the key mechanisms by which new pancreatic beta cells normally form in response to insulin resistance. These findings may some day help researchers devise ways of staving off full-blown diabetes.
Insulin resistance is a condition in which the body needs increasing amounts of insulin to function properly, including keeping blood glucose levels in the normal range. It is a major contributor to type 2 diabetes, obesi
A University of California scientist working at Los Alamos National Laboratory and researchers from Northrop Grumman Space Technology have developed a novel method for generating electrical power for deep-space travel using sound waves. The traveling-wave thermoacoustic electric generator has the potential to power space probes to the furthest reaches of the Universe.
In research reported in a recent issue of the journal Applied Physics Letters, Laboratory scientist Scott Backhaus an
One of the simpler ways to curtail the obesity epidemic could be to cut the volume of sweetened soft drinks and fruit drinks Americans are increasingly consuming, authors of new study say.
The study, conducted at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, showed that energy intake from such drinks in the United States increased 135 percent between about 1977 and 2001. Over the same span, energy intake from milk — a far more nutritious beverage — dropped 38 percent.
Mayo Clinic researchers have used a comparative genomic strategy to demonstrate a causative link between eosinophils, a rare type of white blood cell, and asthma. Their research shows that the presence of these unique blood cells is absolutely required for the development of asthma. The details of this animal-based study appear in the Sept. 17, 2004, issue of Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
For more than a century, scientists
Fundamental questions that particle physicists have pondered for decades might be answered when a $9.2 million neutron physics beam line is built at the Department of Energy’s Spallation Neutron Source on Chestnut Ridge.
At the core of physicists’ excitement is the fact that the SNS will produce up to 100 times more neutrons than are produced by any comparable source in the world. Tapping in to those neutrons will be the Fundamental Neutron Physics beam line, which will he
ESA’s Huygens probe, now orbiting Saturn on board the NASA/ESA/ASI Cassini spacecraft, is in good health and successfully passed its fifteenth ‘In-Flight Checkout’ on 14 September 2004.
This in-flight checkout procedure was the last but one planned before separation of the Huygens probe from Cassini in December this year, and it included some specific activities that were intended to prepare for the separation. The main difference in this procedure from previous checkouts was that
Maggie Hart, a South Dakota School of Mines and Technology paleontology student, recently found a rare, beaked whale that washed ashore on St. Catherine’s Island off the coast of Georgia.
At the time of her discovery in late July, Hart, a master’s degree candidate from Brea, Calif., was working on the St. Catherine’s Island Sea Turtle Conservation Program. In her studies of sea turtles, Hart is collaborating with Mike Knell of Council Bluffs, Iowa. Knell also is a Te
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