ESA’s X-ray observatory, XMM-Newton, has returned tantalising new data about the nature of the Universe. In a survey of distant clusters of galaxies, XMM-Newton has found puzzling differences between today’s clusters of galaxies and those present in the Universe around seven thousand million years ago. Some scientists claim that this can be interpreted to mean that the ’dark energy’ which most astronomers now believe dominates the Universe simply does not exist…
Observati
UK Team is first to use DNA-based techniques to analyse content of spiders’ guts to identify prey
DNA found in a spider’s stomach could herald a breakthrough in the fight against farm pests, which cause millions of dollars of damage to crops.
Cardiff University, UK, scientists, led by Dr Bill Symondson in the School of Biosciences, have become the first to use DNA-based techniques to analyse the content of spiders’ guts to identify the prey they have eaten in
Southern vacation resorts encroaching on key winter habitats crucial to success of migratory birds: Queen’s researchers
(Kingston, ON) – The destruction of tropical forests to create vacation resorts for human “snowbirds” who fly south from Canada and the northern U.S. every winter is creating serious breeding problems for real migratory birds, say Queen’s University biologists.
A new study, headed by Ph.D. student Ryan Norris and his advisor, Professor Laurene Ratcliffe, sh
Using a method usually more suitable to billiards than atomic physics, researchers from Sandia National Laboratories and Columbia University have created extremely cold molecules that could be used as the first step in creating Bose-Einstein molecular condensates. The work is published in the Dec. 12 Science.
The serendipitous achievement came when researchers at Sandia’s Livermore, Calif., and Columbia University, studying collisional energy transfer between a beam of atoms intersecting a
Coral reef health may be accurately estimated from sensors on airplanes and satellites in the future, according to a NASA scientist who is the principal investigator in a collaborative project to develop a method to remotely sense coral health.
Sometimes called the “bellwether of the seas,” coral reefs can give first indications of marine ecosystem health. “Scientists can use coral health as a sensitive indicator of the health of the marine environment,” said Liane Guild, a scientist at NASA
NASA’s Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) is sending home important scientific data and spectacular 3-D views of Earth’s polar ice sheets, clouds, mountains, and forestlands. The data are helping scientists understand how life on Earth is affected by changing climate.
The principal objective of the ICESat mission, and its Geoscience Laser Altimeter System (GLAS) instrument, is to measure the surface elevations of the large ice sheets covering Antarctica and Greenland
Using a suite of microwave remote sensing instruments aboard satellites, scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, Calif., and the University of Montana, Missoula, have observed a recent trend of earlier thawing across the northern high latitudes. This regional thawing trend, advancing almost one day a year since 1988, has the potential to alter the cycle of atmospheric carbon dioxide intake and release by vegetation and soils across the region, potentially resultin
Using the perspective of the last few centuries and millennia, speakers in a press conference at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco will discuss the latest research involving climate reconstructions and different climate models.
The press conference features Caspar Ammann of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Boulder, Colo.; Drew Shindell of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York; and Tom Crowley of Duke University, Durham
New evidence from satellites, models, and ground observations reveal urban areas, with all their asphalt, buildings, and aerosols, are impacting local and possibly global climate processes. This is according to some of the world’s top scientists convening in a special session at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.
To study urban impact on local rainfall, Dr. J. Marshall Shepherd of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., and Steve Burian of the
Radioactive potassium, common enough on Earth to make potassium-rich bananas one of the “hottest” foods around, appears also to be a substantial source of heat in the Earth’s core, according to recent experiments by University of California, Berkeley, geophysicists.
Radioactive potassium, uranium and thorium are thought to be the three main sources of heat in the Earth’s interior, aside from that generated by the formation of the planet. Together, the heat keeps the mantle actively churning
Men with high levels of cognitive and behavioral anger, and women with high levels of behavioral anger, are most at risk The association among anger, alcohol and aggression is not as clear as it may first seem.
New research examines the effects of three components of anger: affective, cognitive and behavioral.
Behavioral anger contributes most to alcohol-related aggression among both men and women. The association among anger, alcohol and aggression
Neuropeptide Y (NPY) is a neurotransmitter that is integral to neurobiological functions such as anxiety, pain, memory and feeding behaviors.
Researchers have found that a compound that blocks NPY activity decreases both the onset as well as the repetition of alcohol consumption.
These findings have important implications for the treatment of both alcohol abuse and dependence. Peptides are a class of neurotransmitters, chemicals used by brain cells to commu
Now that the human genome has been sequenced, sequencing know-how is turning to other organisms. A team of researchers, including some from the University of Iowa, has sequenced the genome of a highly versatile and potentially useful bacterium. The multidisciplinary effort determined the complete genetic sequence of Rhodopseudomonas palustris, a bacterium that could potentially be used for cleaning up toxic industrial waste and as a biocatalyst for producing hydrogen as a bio-fuel.
The rese
You might say that caspases are obsessed with death. The primary agents of programmed cell death, or apoptosis, caspases kill cells by destroying proteins that sustain cellular processes. Apoptosis, a highly controlled sequence of events that eliminates dangerous or unnecessary cells, contributes to a wide variety of developmental and physiological processes–in a developing embryo, apoptosis creates the space between fingers and adjusts nerve cell populations to match the number of cells they targe
The potential of new technologies to reveal insights into the fundamental structure and function of biological systems continues to grow rapidly –but the ability to interpret and merge these datasets lags behind the ability to collect it. In an effort to overcome these limitations, Sven Bergmann, Jan Ihmels, and Naama Barkai, of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, developed a comparative model that integrates gene expression data from microarrays with genomic sequence information
For some brain tumors, the key to success is not just what you know but who you know, according to researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
In trying to develop a mouse model of neurofibromatosis 1 (NF1), a genetic disorder that predisposes children to certain types of brain tumors, the team discovered that tumors only developed when all brain cells were genetically abnormal, not just the cell type that becomes cancerous. The study is featured on the cover of th
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