NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has discovered rich deposits of neon, magnesium, and silicon in a pair of colliding galaxies known as The Antennae. When the clouds in which these elements are present cool, an exceptionally high number of stars with planets should form. These results may foreshadow the fate of the Milky Way and its future collision with the Andromeda Galaxy.
“The amount of enrichment of elements in The Antennae is phenomenal,” said Giuseppina Fabbiano of the Harvard-Smi
Tiny microheaters that can prompt chemical changes in surrounding material may provide the means to more easily grow replacement tissue for injured patients and form the basis for medical sensors that could quickly detect pathogens, according to researchers at the University of Washington who are the first to demonstrate the process.
The key to the technique, according to Associate Professor Karl Böhringer in the UW’s Department of Electrical Engineering, lies in temperature-driven cha
Purdue University researchers have developed a new method to quickly and inexpensively create microfluidic chips, analytic devices with potential applications in food safety, biosecurity, clinical diagnostics, pharmaceuticals and other industries.
“This development democratizes the preparation of microfluidic biochips,” said Michael Ladisch, Distinguished Professor of Agricultural and Biological Engineering and Biomedical Engineering. “This brings the design and manufacture of these devices
Purdue University researchers have shown that extremely thin carbon fibers called “nanotubes” might be used to create brain probes and implants to study and treat neurological damage and disorders.
Probes made of silicon currently are used to study brain function and disease but may one day be used to apply electrical signals that restore damaged areas of the brain. A major drawback to these probes, however, is that they cause the body to produce scar tissue that eventually accumulates and p
The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), one of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), today announced that the first draft version of the honey bee genome sequence has been deposited into free public databases.
The sequence of the honey bee, Apis mellifera, was assembled by a team led by Richard Gibbs, Ph.D., director of the Human Genome Sequencing Center at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. The honey bee genome is about one-tenth the size of the human genome, containin
Call centres are not the “satanic mills’’ they are often made out to be, although call handlers can suffer depression and low motivation if working conditions are not carefully managed.
These are the findings of a study carried out by Christine Sprigg and Phoebe Smith, with support from Professor Robert Jackson, at the Health and Safety Laboratory in Sheffield. Ms Sprigg, now of the University of Sheffield, presented their research today, Wednesday 7 January 2004, at the British Psychologica
ESA’s Mars Express orbiter made its first attempt to establish contact with the Beagle 2 lander, after the two spacecraft separated on 19 December 2003.
The orbiter made its first pass over the Beagle 2 landing site today at 13:13 CET, but could not pick up any signal from the tiny lander. More attempts to contact Beagle 2 are planned in the days to come.
Beagle 2 was released on 19 December on a course towards the Red Planet by Mars Express, the mothership for the 400 million kil
Scientists at the John Innes Centre (JIC) Norwich, have discovered the molecular change that allows plants to remember winter.
Many plants need a cold period (3-8 weeks at 4° – 8°C) early in their growth to stimulate them to flower, this is called vernalisation, and without a suitable cold treatment flowering is delayed. JIC scientists have identified many of the genes involved in this process but their latest discovery is a chemical modification that occurs on one of these genes, wh
Effective team leadership may play an important part in reducing employee stress, while ineffective or ’laissez-faire’ leadership style may lead to increased depression in employees.
These are the findings of a study which was presented today, Wednesday 7 January at the British Psychological Society’s Division of Occupational Psychology Annual Conference at The Stratford Moathouse Hotel, Stratford-upon-Avon.
The study by Jonathon Bell and Dr Angela Carter of the Institute of Work
Ophthalmology researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have identified a key risk factor for the development of cataracts. For the first time, they have demonstrated an association between loss of gel in the eye’s vitreous body — the gel that lies between the back of the lens and the retina — and the formation of nuclear cataracts, the most common type of age-related cataracts.
The researchers reported their findings in the January issue of Investigative O
Observations of explosions from an ultra-powerful magnetic neutron star playing hide-and-seek with astronomers suggest that these exotic objects called magnetars — capable of stripping a credit card clean 100,000 miles away — are far more common than previously thought.
Scientists from the United States and Canada present this result today at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Atlanta . The work is based on observations with the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton obser
Did you just load that interesting new software on your PC? Then wondered where all your storage space has gone, while at the same time your PC seems to have ground to a halt? Think of the same predicament but magnified, not thousands but millions of times. Now you begin to see the problems confronting the world’s research community in cutting-edge research projects. And in particular, the challenges facing the DATAGRID project.
Most challenging processing applications on Earth
Relationships with friends play a significant role in whether teenage girls think about suicide, but have little impact on suicidal thoughts among boys, according to a new nationwide study.
The research found that girls were nearly twice as likely to think about suicide if they had only a few friends and felt isolated from their peers. Girls were also more likely to consider suicide if their friends were not friends with each other.
These relationship factors had no significant eff
Ohio State University physicists and their colleagues have demonstrated for the first time a type of magnetic behavior that was predicted to exist more than 50 years ago.
The behavior involves a special kind of energy transition among atoms in a very small magnet, called chromium-8 (Cr8). And while scientists have long thought that the effect was controlled purely by quantum mechanics, the magnet’s behavior appears to reflect the laws of classical physics.
The classical laws of mov
Trailing 200,000-light-year-long streamers of seething gas, a galaxy that was once like our Milky Way is being shredded as it plunges at 4.5 million miles per hour through the heart of a distant cluster of galaxies. In this unusually violent collision with ambient cluster gas, the galaxy is stripped down to its skeletal spiral arms as it is eviscerated of fresh hydrogen for making new stars.
The galaxy’s untimely demise is offering new clues to solving the mystery of what happens to sp
New Caledonia harbours 45% of species of the family Araucariaceae, belonging to the conifers, recorded in the world, divided between the two genera Araucaria (columnar pines) and Agathis (kaoris). These species are valuable for their ecological, economic and heritage interest, but some are under threat. IRD botanists, who have been studying the flora of New Caledonia for many years, jointly with the Natural Resources Department of the Southern Province of New Caledonia, have just published the first
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