New farm practices and new breeds of crops might someday add to mankind’s toolbox for controlling greenhouse gases that contribute to global climate change.
Research under way at Purdue University seeks to control the most prominent of these greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide, by corralling carbon on the farm in a process known as carbon sequestration.
The research is being supported with a grant of nearly $1 million to Purdue from the Consortium for Agricultural Soil Mitigation
A new type of nanotechnology-based filter that can separate out mixtures of biological molecules has been developed by researchers at the University of California, Davis. The technology could potentially be used, for example, to build small-scale devices for research in genomics by sorting mixtures of different proteins or DNA molecules.
The filter consists of a polycarbonate membrane etched with tiny, evenly-sized pores less than 10 nanometers — a few billionths of an inch — in size. The
A natural method of disarming some types of viruses may enable scientists to someday treat infections with HIV, the AIDS virus, according to a virologist at Jefferson Medical College.
Taking the lead from the common fruit fly, yeast and worms, scientists have recently shown that it may be possible to use small pieces of genetic material called short interfering RNAs (siRNAs) to inhibit HIV from making more copies of itself.
The process, called RNA interference (RNAi), was first di
The monuments of ancient Egypt may have stood for thousands of years in the desert sands, but now they face a new threat — from rising groundwater.
Ayman Ahmed of the University of Sohag, Egypt, is working with Graham Fogg, professor of hydrology at the University of California, Davis, to study the problem and find ways to solve it.
Preliminary findings by Ahmed and Fogg indicate that farming, urbanization and residential housing near the temples are causing water tables to rise.
New parallel library allows maximum performance for communication networks
A new message-passing library that makes it possible to extract optimum performance from both workstation and personal computer clusters, as well as from large massively parallel supercomputers has been developed by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory. The new library, called MP_Lite, supports and enhances the basic capabilities that most software programs require to communicate bet
Scientist continues to build case for origin of plate tectonics
A Saint Louis University geologist has unearthed further evidence in his mounting case that shifting of the continents — and perhaps life on Earth — began much earlier than many scientists believe.
Tim Kusky, a professor of Earth and atmospheric sciences, has discovered the world’s first large intact pieces of oceanic mantle from the planet’s earliest period, the Archean. The nearly mile-long section of rock,
The scientific community concurs that the occurrence of harmful algal blooms (HABs) is increasing worldwide. The annual loss from HABs worldwide is probably more than $1 billion, including both mortality and unmarketable products. The annual human cost has been estimated at 2,000 cases of poisoning with 15% mortality. Because there is no international record of economic loss and human intoxication incidents by HABs, these numbers are almost certainly underestimates.
In a recent issue of Nort
Women having their babies by caesarean section could find it harder to become pregnant later, a study has found. Researchers in Bristol have discovered that once women have had a caesarean and then try to get pregnant again, the risk of it taking more than a year to conceive another baby increases.
The seven thousand women were all part of the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), popularly known as Children of the 90s, which has monitored the health and development of ov
The basic technology that produces X-rays has remained essentially the same for a century, but now scientists and physicians at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Applied Nanotechnologies Inc. say they should be able to improve it significantly.
Experiments the team conducted have shown they can cause carbon nanotubes, a new form of carbon discovered about a decade ago, to generate intense electron beams that bombard a metal “target” to produce X-rays. Researchers say they
Technique could dramatically diminish hunger in Africa
Corn harvests on experimental plots and in farmers’ fields in four East and Southern African countries have yielded striking results in long-term trials of an innovative witchweed-fighting technology developed by a Weizmann Institute scientist in collaboration with researchers at CIMMYT (the Spanish acronym for the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center). The new technology will be presented to seed producers, governmen
Capping two years of research, a nationwide group of over 100 scientists has created a powerful new computer model of the Earth’s climate. The model surpasses previous efforts by successfully incorporating the impact of such variables as ocean currents and changes in land-surface temperatures.
Researchers will use the model, called CCSM-2 (Community Climate System Model, version 2) to probe how our climate works and to experiment with “what-if” scenarios to predict what our climate may be l
The oral medications most widely used to lower blood-sugar levels in patients with type 2 diabetes are likely to increase the risk of spasm of the coronary arteries, reports a University of Chicago-based research team in the July 15 issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation. Constricted arteries increase blood pressure and decrease blood flow to the heart, causing chest pain and even sudden death, shows the study, which focused on mice with a genetic defect that duplicates the actions of these
UC Berkeley scientist urges drilling into frozen lake under ice near South Pole as prelude to drilling into subglacial lakes in Antarctica and into Mars polar caps
Measurements of the ice temperature far below the South Pole suggest that a so-called “lake” discovered at the base of the ice is most likely permafrost – a frozen mixture of dirt and ice – because the temperature is too low for liquid water.
Far from being a disappointment, says a University of California, Berkeley p
A team of Ohio State University researchers has returned from an expedition in southeastern Alaska with the longest ice core ever drilled from a mountainous glacier.
The core measures 460 meters (1,509 feet) and is 150 meters (492 feet) longer than the previous longest core – a record of ice from the Guliya ice cap in western China that eventually relinquished a climate record stretching back 760,000 years – the oldest such record retrieved to date.
Until the new core is analyzed in
Human neurons grown as cells cloned from a tumor helped restore the function of severely injured spinal cords in rats, University of South Florida researchers say in a study released this week in the Journal of Neurosurgery: Spine.
“Transplants of these specially treated cells were used to patch a short circuit in the spinal cord of rats,” said Samuel Saporta, PhD, associate director of the USF Center for Aging and Brain Repair, professor of anatomy and lead author of the study. “We demonstr
A process that would be a plastics recycler’s nightmare may help farmers deal with the disposal of agricultural and domestic plastics by creating burnable, energy-efficient plastic nuggets, according to a Penn State agricultural engineer.
“In plastics recycling there are two unbreakable rules,” says James W. Garthe, instructor in agricultural engineering and cooperative extension specialist. “You cannot mix types of plastic, and the plastics must be clean. This process does both since
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