An international team of astronomers headed by Dr. Michael Drinkwater (Queensland, Australia), Dr. Michael Gregg (Livermore, USA) and Dr. Michael Hilker from the University of Bonn has discovered a new kind of small, very compact galaxy. Their findings will be published in the next edition of the prestigious academic journal Nature on 29th May. This new type of galaxy could help to explain the discrepancy between observations and cosmological models.
The galaxies in our universe are not all
Assisted reproduction can safely help HIV positive men to become fathers without infecting their partners, according to new research from French fertility experts.
But, the news is not so good for HIV positive women. Assisted reproduction techniques do not seem to provide the same success for them, the researchers reported today (Thursday 29 May) in Europe’s leading reproductive medicine journal Human Reproduction[1].
Dr Jeanine Ohl and her Strasbourg-based team carried out various
A new study by University of Toronto researchers offers the first-ever glimpse inside a laser while it’s operating, a breakthrough that could lead to more powerful and efficient lasers for fibre-optic communication systems.
“We’ve seen the inner workings of a laser in action,” says investigator Ted Sargent, a professor in the Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “We’ve produced a topographical map of the landscape that electrons see as they flow into these
A new study in the Institute of Physics journal Physics in Medicine and Biology, reveals that the new generation of digital mobile phones can interfere with many types of heart pacemaker. The pacemakers can confuse the signals generated by mobile phones for the heart’’s own electrical signals, causing the pacemaker to malfunction. The authors of the paper, based in the US and Italy, say that newer pacemakers fitted with a ceramic filter are immune and recommend that all manufacturers use th
Scientists at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), Teddington, Middlesex, UK have good news for manufacturers and users across the optical instrumentation industry. Based on existing processes developed in the US and Japan, a team of researchers at NPL has developed a new technique for commercial manufacturing of ultra-black coatings, which represent one of the blackest, lowest reflectance surfaces developed so far.
Performance of optical instrumentation depends on the quality of material
New features may make southern sky’s ’Coalsack’ ideal for further study
Stargazers call a prominent dark black region in the Southern Hemisphere’s night sky the Coalsack. Even for naked-eye observers, the cloud of cold gas that makes up the Coalsack is hard to miss: It covers a part of the misty luminescence of the Milky Way, blocking out distant stars of our galaxy with the deep black shades that have earned the Coalsack its name.
A newly discovered aspect of the C
If an asteroid crashes into the Earth, it is likely to splash down somewhere in the oceans that cover 70 percent of the planet’s surface. Huge tsunami waves, spreading out from the impact site like the ripples from a rock tossed into a pond, would inundate heavily populated coastal areas. A computer simulation of an asteroid impact tsunami developed by scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, shows waves as high as 400 feet sweeping onto the Atlantic Coast of the United States.
Human beings may have made their first journey out of Africa as recently as 70,000 years ago, according to a new study by geneticists from Stanford University and the Russian Academy of Sciences. Writing in the American Journal of Human Genetics, the researchers estimate that the entire population of ancestral humans at the time of the African expansion consisted of only about 2,000 individuals.
“This estimate does not preclude the presence of other populations of Homo sapiens sapiens [mode
Men are from Mars and women are from Venus, or so we’ve been told, and when it comes to jealousy this is especially true. Men, psychologists have long contended, tend to care more about sexual infidelity while women usually react more strongly to emotional infidelity. This view has long been espoused by evolutionary psychologists who attribute these gender differences to natural selection, which, they say, encouraged the sexes to develop different emotional reactions to jealousy.
However, a
Genes come in pairs, one copy from your mom and one from your dad. In some genetic conditions, inheriting one bad, or mutant, gene copy from either parent is sufficient to cause disease. University of Iowa researchers have shown that it is possible to silence a mutant gene without affecting expression of the normal gene.
The findings suggest that the gene-silencing technique might one day be useful in treating many human diseases, including cancer, Huntington’s disease and similar genetic
As SARS and other new diseases cross geographical boundaries with increasing rapidity, the need for Binghamton University’s new master of science in biomedical anthropology becomes ever more apparent.
The program, the first of its kind in the world, will offer a multi-disciplinary approach to the study of the transmission and spread of infections, cellular and molecular mechanisms of disease, and the interaction of biological and socio-cultural factors that shape health outcomes.
Th
BU invention could ’sweeten’ diabetes therapy within five years
C.J. Zhong hopes that within the next three to five years diabetics the world could see their quality of life enhanced by his tiny invention-a chip-sized pump with no moving parts. The device is also expected to find its way into myriad industrial and environmental applications, where it could mean huge savings in manufacturing and monitoring processes.
Zhong’s patent on the low-power, electrically
Inflation’s got nothing to do with it. Since the beginning of time, a picture has always been worth more than a thousand words. But in this age of information proliferation, that reality is the taproot of a vexing problem that Zhongfei “Mark” Zhang, an assistant professor of computer science at Binghamton University, is determined to help solve.
From personal and commercial digital image libraries and multimedia databases to data mining programs and high-tech security and defense survei
There is more to mother-of-pearl than good looks. Also called nacre, the gleaming, white material is renowned in scientific circles for its strong, yet flexible, properties. Now researchers have developed a nanoscale, layered material that comes close to nacre’s properties, including its iridescence.
The ability to nanomanufacture artificial nacre may provide lightweight, rigid composites for aircraft parts, artificial bone and other applications.
Reporting online in Nature Mater
The old song, asking rain to “go away” and “come again another day,” may get even older for people who live in large coastal cities, according to new NASA-funded research. According to the study, urban heat islands, created from pavement and buildings in big coastal cities like Houston, cause warm air to rise and interact with sea breezes to create heavier and more frequent rainfall in and downwind of the cities. Analysis of Houston-area rain-gauge data, both prior to and since urbanization,
Early evolution of life as we know it may have depended on DNA’s ability to absorb UV light. This insight into the early moments of life on Earth comes from research published today in the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology.
The research fills in one of the major gaps in our understanding about the origins of life: how single molecules were able to join together to create the self-replicating long chain molecules of RNA, the precursors of DNA. It “sheds new light on the earliest steps of evo
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