The University of Bradford has conducted a study that reveals that mobile phone use can improve the short-term memory of men – but not women.
Dr Jim Smythe and Professor Brenda Costall of the University’’s School of Life Sciences carried out an experiment on both the long and short-term memory of people that were briefly exposed to electromagnetic fields (EMF) emitted from mobile telephones.
Thirty-three male and twenty-nine female students volunteered to be randomly assigne
Scientists at the University of Reading are leading a consortium (universities of Reading, Cardiff and Southampton, and the Natural History Museum) that is developing a “virtual laboratory” to help researchers around the world make sense of the mass of diverse, incomplete and often incompatible databases available on different species, according to an article published in the July edition of BBSRC business.
One species covered by the scientists is the yellow-flowered Spanish Broom which is
RIT study analyzes impacts of future transportation
Move over gas-guzzlers. The year is 2025 and 50 percent of all vehicles are electrically powered. Hybrid electrics, pure electrics and fuel cell vehicles share the road with the conventional gasoline-driven variety.
A recent study by James Winebrake, chair of public policy at Rochester Institute of Technology, analyzed this hypothetical transportation future and found economic benefits exceeding billions of dollars annuall
Achievement Could Improve Understanding of Superconductivity
A team of researchers at JILA, a joint institute of the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado at Boulder, has done the physics equivalent of efficiently turning yin into yang. They changed individual potassium atoms belonging to a class of particles called fermions into molecules that are part of a fundamentally different class of particles known as bosons
Explorers in the 1800s discovered through fossils that deciduous forests once covered the poles, but researchers still do not know why leaf-dropping trees were preferred over evergreens.
“The dominant idea since the 1940s was that because of the polar light regime of continuous darkness and warmth, leafless branches had an advantage over evergreen canopies in the polar forests,” says Dana Royer, research associate in geosciences, Penn State.
This carbon loss hypothesis states that
Discovery offers ‘new hope to patients by paving the way for future therapies that will change the course of hepatitis’
A protein molecule that contributes to the severity of chronic viral hepatitis in humans, and which may also be implicated in SARS, has been identified by a team of scientists from Toronto General and St. Michael’s Hospitals. This data is published in the July 1 issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation.
The protein, called Fgl2/fibroleukin prothr
A Los Alamos National Laboratory researcher and her colleagues have found that people with less common types of proteins on their white blood cells seem to mount a better immune response against the Human Immunodeficiency Virus – the virus that causes AIDS – and tend to fight progression of the disease better than people with common white blood cell proteins.
The research, presented in the July issue of Nature Medicine, eventually might help researchers better understand and exploit potenti
Researchers have isolated a novel bacterium that flourishes as it destroys harmful chlorinated compounds in polluted environments, leaving behind environmentally benign end products. The finding opens the door for designing more efficient and successful bioremediation strategies for thousands of contaminated sites that remain threats, despite years of expensive cleanup work.
“This organism might be useful for cleaning contaminated subsurface environments and restoring drinking-water reservo
Saltiness often enhances our enjoyment of certain foods — think French fries or a Margarita. But salt is an essential nutrient for humans and other animals, and far from being a trivial matter of taste, the ability to detect salt is critical for survival. A University of Iowa study provides insight on how humans and other animals are able to detect salt. The study appears in the July 3 issue of Neuron.
“Given that salt is essential for survival, it is not surprising that animals have devel
Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility have produced first light from their 10 kilowatt Free-Electron Laser (FEL). This device has been upgraded from the “one kilowatt Infrared Demonstration” FEL, which broke power records by delivering 2,100 watts of infrared light during 2001. Only one and one-half years after the one kilowatt FEL was dismantled, the newly improved FEL, designed to produce 10 kilowatts of infrared and one kilowatt of ultraviol
An exotic species or weed trying to establish itself in a new ecosystem will have a harder time if it encounters a diverse mix of resident species rather than just a few species, according to research at the University of Minnesota. Working with prairie plants, the research team found that a rich assemblage of species repels invaders because it is more likely to contain plants occupying a niche similar to what the invader needs, as well as plants that make good all-around competitors. The findings ha
An increasing number of doctors and other health experts have been encouraging older adults to rise from their recliners and go for a walk, a bike ride, a swim, or engage in just about any other form of physical activity as a defense against the potentially harmful health consequences of a sedentary lifestyle.
“Exercise is touted as a panacea for older adults,” said Jeffrey Woods, a kinesiology professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who noted that fitness programs are
Daniel S. Carman (Ohio University) and nearly 150 members of Jefferson Lab’s CLAS Collaboration studied the spin transfer from a polarized electron beam to a produced Lambda particle. Their results were recently published in Physical Review Letters.
Measurements taken using Jefferson Lab’s CEBAF Large Acceptance Spectrometer (CLAS) are telling us more about how matter is produced from “nothing,” that is, the vacuum.
Using the CLAS in Hall B, Daniel S. Carman of Ohio Universit
In this year’s competition of the international scientific association, EUNITE, three teams have succeeded in predicting the temporal development of the five response signals in the process control of a glass melting tank (with 29 input parameters) over a period of two weeks. The – weighted – deviation of the modelled values from the real values was 0.3 per cent. The winners will present their results at the EUNITE Conference from 10th to 12th July in Oulu, Finland. As an expression of its gratitude,
What determines the number of species in a given area? The amount of energy available to organisms (an area’s primary productivity) has been shown to be a key determinant of plant and animal biodiversity. However, it is not known if primary productivity can affect bacterial biodiversity. In an article to appear in the July 2003 issue of Ecology Letters, researchers led by a team at Stanford University report for the first time that primary productivity can, in fact, influence the diversity of ba
Students in an online class who learned networking through a commercially available simulation scored higher and retained more course information than students taught with a traditional network-diagramming software package, says a Penn State researcher.
“Those students also demonstrated better understanding of the networking concepts and indicated they spent more time on course assignments,” said Brian Cameron, instructor in Penn State’s School of Information Sciences and Technology (I
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