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.
Choosing a product is largely an emotional process. The subject of Pieter Desmet’s research project was to try to unravel this relationship between product and emotion. Along with his research, he also developed a Product-Emotion meter (PrEmo) with which emotions towards a product can be measured. Desmet will defend his thesis on Tuesday 25 June at TU Delft.
Emotions can, for example, lead us to drive a certain car or use a certain brand of toothpaste. Producers and developers of products
University of California, Santa Barbara scientists and U.S. Army researchers are making progress in the study of spider dragline silk, according to recently published proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The protein that lets spiders drop and helps the web to catch prey is what interests the researchers. The molecules are designed to be pulled; they are elastic and very strong. The silk can be extended 30 to 50 percent of its length before it breaks. It is stronger than steel a
Universities, companies and research centres have sent more than 15,000 ideas for European research projects to the European Commission. More than 100,000 groups and institutions were involved in drafting the ideas; the proposed teams involve potentially several hundreds of thousands of researchers across Europe and beyond. In a radical departure from previous programmes and for the first time, on March 20, 2002, the Commission asked the scientific community to say what they see as the most promising
Research designed to enable a goalkeeper to significantly improve his chance of saving a penalty may help England to banish the penalty shootout nightmares that have dogged the team in major competitions over the past decade.
University of Greenwich sports scientists, working with West Ham United football academy, have completed a study proving that penalty takers subconsciously give readable physical clues to the direction of their penalty kicks. These clues could be used by goalkeepers to
Cooperation to better follow, understand and predict the climate
Eight institutes observe the climate together
On Thursday 23 May 2002, an agreement will be signed in Cabauw by 8 cooperating institutes situated in the Netherlands. The cooperation project is called CESAR, and is in the form of a national observatory for the atmosphere. The goal of the cooperation is to be able to better follow the development of the climate and to be able to better understand and predict it. Only a
An academic at the University of Edinburgh is attempting to solve the riddle of how jokes work — and to set up a way of analyzing the language used in jokes — as part of wider research into humour. Dr Graeme Ritchie is not investigating how funny particular jokes are, as opinions about that vary widely. Instead, he is looking at whether something is or is not a joke, about which there is more agreement. He plans to experiment, to see how much agreement there is amongst people as to what actually cons
Europe’s leading researchers on human health and wildlife impacts of endocrine disrupters will be brought together under a new research “cluster” supported by DG Research which is to contribute €20 million. This cluster project will provide a critical mass for new and existing research on endocrine disrupters and their effect on human health and on the environment. Endocrine disrupters are suspected of causing problems for human health and wildlife. For instance, cases have been reported of fish, fro
Researchers at the Universities of Warwick and Keele are being supported by the Economic and Social Research Council to watch the popular game show Who Wants to be a Millionaire? The globally broadcast show is a treasure trove of data on how all sorts of people of different ages and genders and nationalities perceive and act on risk.
One of the researchers, economist Professor Ian Walker from the University of Warwick said:
“Many decisions involve weighing up potential gains and losses w
Nowadays society is deeply concerned with the safety issues, the flight safety in particular. Despite the technological progress, people can not do without dogs` assistance, as no device is capable of replacing the dogs` scent in search of explosive substances and drugs. Dogs are indispensable for differentiating between different individuals by specific smells. To work efficiently a dog needs excellent scent and ability to learn quickly. It is only in Russia that the unique animals -dog and jackal h
Psychologists have found that colors enhance an individual’s visual memory. From a series of experiments, researchers learned that subjects were more likely to recall the color version of an image than the same scene in black and white. The results, which appear in the May issue of the journal Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, also indicate that natural colors make a difference. A photo of a landscape with a green sky, for example, will not lodge as effectively in the brai
Sustained use of the drug infliximab could offer substantial clinical benefit to people with Crohn’s disease, conclude authors of a study in this week’s issue of THE LANCET.
Crohn’s disease is a chronic inflammatory disorder of the intestines. Patients often have to be treated with steroids, which are associated with severe side-effects. Previous research has suggested that the drug infliximab could reduce disease symptoms in the short term; Stephen Hanauer and colleagues from the Universit
Desire drives remote-controlled rodents.
Remote-controlled rats could soon be detecting earthquake survivors or leading bomb-disposal teams to buried land mines.
Signals from a laptop up to 500 metres away make the rats run, climb, jump and even cross brightly lit open spaces, contrary to their instincts. The rodents carry a backpack containing a radio receiver and a power source that transmits the signals into their brains through electrical probes the breadth of a hair.
An article in the May issue of Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine suggests that much of the medical inspiration for Mary Shelley’s legendary novel Frankenstein came not from central Europe, but from a retired Scots physician living in Windsor. Christopher Goulding, a postgraduate student at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, bases his claims on his PhD research into the scientific interests of the novelist’s husband, the poet Percy Shelley.
Most criticism of Mary Shelley’s much-in
Fatty diets or high alcohol intake during pregnancy may lead to diabetes in children
Women who consume a high fat diet or who drink significant amounts of alcohol during pregnancy may increase the risk of their child developing diabetes as an adult according to a study in the current edition of the Journal of Endocrinology.
A team led by Dr Sam Pennington of the Department of Biochemistry, Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University has found that insulin resistance,
Is it possible to make components out of organic polymers (plastics) whose structure is such that severed nerves can grow right into them and connect with electrodes in a prosthetic hand, for example? This is one of the research fields for Tobias Nyberg at the Section for Biomolecular and Organic Electronics at Linköping University, Sweden.
Part of Tobias Nyberg’s dissertation is based on collaboration with cell biologist Helena Jerregård. Her task is to find ways to get tangled nerves to s
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