University of Southampton archaeologists Professor David Peacock and Dr Lucy Blue have just returned from a pioneering expedition investigating Roman sites in the East African country of Eritrea alongside colleagues from the University of Asmara. The University group is the first from the UK to work in the country since it won its independence more than a decade ago. They are already planning to return to this remote area on the shores of the Red Sea, previously part of Ethiopia.
Investigati
Studies of seabed algae and sandbanks have shown the potential of using autonomous sensors for environmental monitoring. SUMARE has proven them to be more efficient, cost-effective and accurate.
Led by the Management Unit of the North Sea Mathematical Models at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, one of the tasks of this IST programme-funded project was to map maerl, a calcareous alga which forms large deposits or ’beds’ on the seabed of Brittany, the North Sea and Ir
Music’s ability to make us feel chirpy, sad, excited or just plain bored can be accurately predicted by only a few of its basic elements, an Australian scientist has discovered.
“Among other things, loudness, tempo and pitch have a measurable impact on people’s emotional response to music,” says University of NSW music psychologist, Dr Emery Schubert.
His is the first study of its kind to mathematically quantify the emotional impact of music. Sixty-seven subjects listene
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill scientists have discovered a protein in the cell wall of parasites that’s crucial to the molecular mechanism allowing them to move between cells, survive and cause disease.
The discovery was made in Toxoplasma gondii, an organism that can cause blindness and brain damage in people with an impaired immune system and can cause severe disease in first trimester fetuses. In addition, the organism is used as a model experimental system for s
As if getting to Mars wasn’t hard enough, astronauts also have to worry about what to wear when they arrive. Their concerns are not fashion pundits but exposure to micrometeor sandstorms, radiation, and a hyper-cold climate.
However, three undergraduate students at the University of Alberta – Jennifer Marcy, Ann Shalanski, and Matthew Yarmuch – addressed the problem in Dr. Barry Patchett’s Materials Design 443 class and have published their findings in the Journal of Materials Eng
In today’s issue of Science (21 May 2004), a team of U.S. and Brazilian scientists show that the rate of forest destruction has accelerated significantly in Brazilian Amazonia since 1990. The team asserts, moreover, that Amazonian deforestation will likely continue to increase unless the Brazilian government alters its aggressive plans for highway and infrastructure expansion.
“The recent deforestation numbers are just plain scary,” said William Laurance of the Smithsonian Tropical Res
Research recently conducted on the Texas South Plains may help wine grape growers conserve irrigation water without reducing grape yield or quality.
“The concept is known as deficit irrigation. You give the vines less than 100 percent of their actual water needs prior to veraison, or ripening,” said Ed Hellman, Texas Cooperative Extension viticulture specialiast based in Lubbock. Hellman has a joint appointment with Texas A&M University and Texas Tech University.
“Deficit irrigati
Researchers at Georgetown University have developed a novel technology to precisely measure the sensitivity of nerve fibers that wire up the brain during development. Through use of this technology, they discovered that these fibers, or axons, possess an incredible sensitivity to molecular guidance cues that direct the axon’s route to its desired destination in the brain. Their findings are described in the June issue of Nature Neuroscience.
Similar to connecting your PC, monitor, mouse an
Researchers have identified the first gene linked to the productivity of the stem cells that produce sperm in mammals. The discovery was made by applying the latest laboratory methods to a strain of mice restored from embryos frozen since the early 70s. The findings, which could someday have implications for infertility, contraception, and stem cell transplantation therapy, will be published in the June issue of Nature Genetics.
What researchers are trying to do is unravel the mystery of the
Men don’t recognize their disease until a late stage
The rate of male breast cancer is on the rise and the disease in men is usually detected when the tumors are bigger, have spread and may be more aggressive, compared to diagnosis of the disease in women, concludes the largest study ever conducted of male breast cancer.
The findings, published today in the online edition CANCER and will appear in the July 1 print issue of the publication, suggest both that breast cance
A breakthrough in polymer development means that soon there may be a radical new treatment for people with broken bones – a special kind of material that can ’glue’ the bone back together and support it while it heals.
The material is designed to break down as the bone regrows leaving only natural tissue.
Scientists at CSIRO Molecular Science have developed a biodegradable polymer that can be used in the human body. Not only is it biodegradable and biocompatible, it can be
A pair of scientists has proposed a new model for behavioral development among social insects, suggesting that a higher male susceptibility to disease has helped shape the evolution of the insects’ behavior.
What might be called the “sick-male” theory has been proposed by animal behaviorists Sean O’Donnell of the University of Washington and Samuel Beshers of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and appears in the current issue of Proceedings Biological Sciences, publish
As the pace of the Modernising Government agenda increases, support for electronic service delivery is becoming an increasingly essential pre-requisite of most ICT strategies. e-Government is forcing a radical re-evaluation of the role played by websites, Intranets and customer service teams. Many local authorities are already using the Internet imaginatively to provide community information services with limited degrees of end user interaction. Others have developed or are re-designing existing cu
The 150-kilometre-per-hour winds of Typhoon Nida brought destruction and death to the Philippines this week. At least 31 people were killed and hundreds more were made homeless as the storm passed across the eastern part of the country on Wednesday.
Envisat acquired this image of the eye of the Typhoon on Tuesday 18 May, using its Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) in reduced resolution mode. The 1200-metre resolution image is some 1150 km wide.
The storm caused floods
When a galaxy known as M82 had a near-miss with its neighbour, it set off an explosive burst of star formation that sent plumes of hot gas tens of thousands of light years into space. Now a team of UK and American astronomers has discovered that these gas clouds are like the jets from a high pressure shower head.
M82 – which astronomers call a “starburst galaxy” – is located at a distance of a bit more than 10 million light years from our own Milky Way. Dr. Linda Smith, from the Department
Many flowering plants prevent inbreeding and increase genetic diversity by a process called self-incompatibility, in which pollination fails to set seed if the pollen is identified as its own by the pistil. A research team, led by Teh-hui Kao, Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Penn State, has announced, in a paper published in the May 20 issue of Nature, the discovery of a gene of petunias that controls pollen function in self-incompatibility. This discovery completes a critical miss
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