Growing economic activity in the Arctic, such as fishing, mineral exploration and shipping, is emphasizing the need for accurate predictions of how much of the…

Ant colonies are known for their efficiency in finding the best route to food sources. So Hsiao, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Virginia…

Markus Landgraf of the European Space Agency and colleagues (*) have found the first direct evidence that a bright disc of dust surrounds our Solar System, starting beyond the orbit of Saturn.

Remarkably, their discovery gives astronomers a way to determine which other stars in the Galaxy are most likely to harbour planets and allows mission planners to draw up a ’short-list’ of stars to be observed by ESA’s future planet-search missions, Eddington and Darwin.

The discovery of th

Computer security researchers suggest ways to thwart new form of cybercrime

Most experts on computer crime focus on attacks against Web servers, bank account tampering and other mischief confined to the digital world. But by using little more than a Web search engine and some simple software, a computer-savvy criminal or terrorist could easily leap beyond the boundaries of cyberspace to wreak havoc in the physical world, a team of Internet security researchers has concluded.

If you’re hunting for illegal drugs, you don’t have to leave your computer desk to find them. A simple internet search will turn up dozens of websites that let you order your drug-of-choice for home-delivery.

In fact, if you search for “no prescription codeine” through one of the standard computer-search systems, the odds are almost fifty-fifty that the first site you hit will provide an instant opportunity to buy drugs illegally.

That finding by researchers at the University of

Duke University Medical Center researchers have found that contrary to the classical model of aging, increased blood pressure does not accelerate the age-related decline in performing certain mental tasks.

Furthermore, the researchers reported, middle-aged subjects with high blood pressure showed more of a slowing in cognitive performance tests than did older adults with high blood pressure.

According to the researchers, past studies have been epidemiological in nature and have hi

Show that little sleep for a short period improves some simple tasks

Lack of sleep can affect an individual’s memory, ability to perform simple daily tasks, and attention span. Recent studies that help decipher the basic mechanism of sleep may help in the development of drugs that reduce the need for sleep in military combat or other circumstances.

In other research, investigators have found that sleeping only a few hours a night over a long period of time impairs memor

UMHS study finds inaccurate, old information on nearly one-third of Web sites

Unlike more common cancers like breast cancer, prostate cancer or melanoma, few people understand the basic facts about what causes bladder cancer and how it is treated. So when patients are diagnosed with bladder cancer, they often turn to the Internet for information.

But a new study by researchers at the University of Michigan Health System found 32 percent of Web sites about bladder cancer cont

Of all the personal computers to be unwrapped during the holiday season, more than 80 percent will be used to go online and search the Web’s more than 92 million gigabytes of data (comparable to a 2 billion-volume encyclopedia). Getting online is the easy part, finding a useful Web page is a bit harder-keeping track of a useful Web page is another issue altogether.

People have devised many tricks-such as sending e- mails to themselves or jotting on sticky notes-for keeping track of Web pa

At a press briefing in London today, Professor Colin Pillinger (Open University), Beagle lead scientist, and Dr Mark Sims (University of Leicester), the mission manager, congratulated their colleagues at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the successful landing of the Spirit rover on Mars.

“I’d like to give congratulations to NASA and the Spirit team for getting the lander down safely,” said Professor Pillinger. “We wish them every luck.”

Adding his congratulations, Mark Sims said,

The world’s leading online service for sci-tech information STN International, whose European partner is FIZ Karlsruhe, has complemented its offer of specialist databases with LISA, a new database for library and information science.

LISA (Library and Information Science Abstracts) produced by Cambridge Scientific Abstracts is is an international abstracting and indexing tool designed for library professionals and other information specialists. It covers a wide variety of subjects

“The Web will become more than what we see on our computer screens, it will become a place where computers interact with each other and where meaning is attached to information.” That is the vision behind a cutting-edge Semantic Web project.

For Richard Benjamins, the coordinator of the IST project ESPERONTO, the future of the Semantic Web lies in it becoming “something akin to ambient intelligence” with the meaning of digital information understandable not only by humans but by a

The World Wide Web allows us to access masses of information, both textual and visual. Conducting a search for images by entering a few keywords into a search engine is simple, but such a search often results in hundreds and sometimes thousands of images being returned. Many of these images will be totally unrelated to the subject of the search as current image searching is largely based on words rather than image content.

Oxford Inventors collaborating with colleagues at California In

A systematic search through human genes has begun at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany. Working within the MitoCheck consortium that includes 10 other institutes throughout Europe, the EMBL scientists will silence all human genes, one-by-one, to find those involved in cell division (mitosis) and to answer fundamental questions of how cell division is regulated.

The scientists will use a method called ‘RNA interference (RNAi)’ where chemically synthes

Computers can predict the detailed structure of small proteins nearly as well as experimental methods, at least some of the time, according to new studies by Howard Hughes Medical Institute researchers.

The findings, which were reported in the September 16, 2005, issue of the journal Science, provide a glimmer of hope that scientists eventually may be able to determine the structure of proteins from their genomic sequences, a problem that has seemed insurmountable.

Tuberculosis is an extremely insidious disease. The pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis can rest undetected many years in the human body, and infected people show no symptoms – until the disease suddenly breaks out. Worldwide, the number of deaths related to tuberculosis amounts to 2 million per year, eight million new infections occur annually. Dangerous centers of infection are, for instance, third-world countries or prisons in countries of the former Soviet Union. In some of the prisons, one hu

A EU-sponsored project has developed a suite of tools that will enable biotech companies to mine through vast quantities of data created by modern life-science labs to find the nuggets of genetic gold that lie within.

The BioGrid project brought together six partners from the UK, Germany, Cyprus and The Netherlands to address one of the key problems facing the life sciences today.

“How to integrate the huge volume of disparate data – on gene expression, protein interactio

Elvis. That is the nickname that Larry Mallard, refuge manager for the White River National Wildlife Refuge in southeastern Arkansas, uses for the ivory-billed woodpecker (Campephilus principalis), now being sought in Mallard’s woods by Cornell Lab of Ornithology staffers and volunteers.

Mallard betrays a hint of mixed feelings: He has been managing the area for other endangered species, but only since the woodpecker’s rediscovery has the refuge’s conservation needs received any

The thyroid gland is very sensitive to ionizing radiation. The number of patients with thyroid gland cancer is particularly high among those who endured the Chernobyl catastrophe in childhood. Ultrasonic scanning and bioptic tests investigations are usually used for early detection of thyroid gland cancer but researchers do not stop the search of more efficient methods.

They deal with molecular markers of cancer in order to discover mutation of the genes participating in carcinogenesis.

In the first study to evaluate this small high tech device, the research team saw a significant increase in the effectiveness and speed with which visually…