|
Latest Articles: Science/Tech
Fungus stopped coal formation
Post Date: 2012-06-29 06:53:05 by Tatarewicz
0 Comments
Study On Fungi Helps Explain Coal Formation and May Advance Future Biofuels Production ScienceDaily (June 28, 2012) — A new study--which includes the first large-scale comparison of fungi that cause rot decay--suggests that the evolution of a type of fungi known as white rot may have brought an end to a 60-million-year-long period of coal deposition known as the Carboniferous period. Coal deposits that accumulated during the Carboniferous, which ended about 300 million years ago, have historically fueled about 50 percent of U.S. electric power generation. In addition, the study provides insights about diverse fungal enzymes that might be used in the future to help generate biofuels, ...
Viewing atoms in terms of their internal fields
Post Date: 2012-06-29 05:00:58 by Tatarewicz
0 Comments
A new high-tech method for imaging the electric fields of atoms could lead to advances in areas as diverse as data storage, solar cells and batteries. Research published today in the prestigious journal Nature Physics detailed how physicists from Monash University and Japanese institutions including the University of Tokyo and the Japan Science and Technology Agency viewed the electric fields of atoms using a new advanced scanning transmission electron microscopy technique. Electric fields are produced by the electrically-charged particles within atoms known as protons and electrons. The electrical forces between the positively and negatively charged particles play an important structural ...
Report: Solar Panel Supply Will Far Exceed Demand Beyond 2012
Post Date: 2012-06-28 23:20:57 by farmfriend
1 Comments
Report: Solar Panel Supply Will Far Exceed Demand Beyond 2012 Ucilia Wang, Contributor hen solar equipment manufactures began posting big losses during 2011, forcing some to close factories or even file for bankruptcies, many of them wondered: when will the market recover? End of 2011? Mid-2012? Not this year. Or even next year. Solar panel makers are on track to deliver 59 gigawatts of their products worldwide this year when demand will likely hit 30 gigawatts, according to a report released by GTM Research Wednesday. To re-establish a healthy balance of supply and demand, an estimated 21 gigawatts of existing factories will close by 2015, said Shyam Mehta, author of the report. The ...
Antarctic ice is growing, not melting away
Post Date: 2012-06-28 23:18:50 by farmfriend
1 Comments
Antarctic ice is growing, not melting away Ice expanding in much of Antarctica Eastern coast getting colder Western section remains a concern ICE is expanding in much of Antarctica, contrary to the widespread public belief that global warming is melting the continental ice cap. The results of ice-core drilling and sea ice monitoring indicate there is no large-scale melting of ice over most of Antarctica, although experts are concerned at ice losses on the continent's western coast. Antarctica has 90 per cent of the Earth's ice and 80 per cent of its fresh water, The Australian reports. Extensive melting of Antarctic ice sheets would be required to raise sea levels ...
Antarctic ice shelves not melting at all, new field data show
Post Date: 2012-06-28 23:12:59 by farmfriend
0 Comments
Antarctic ice shelves not melting at all, new field data show Crafty boffins got elephant seals to survey for them By Lewis Page • Get more from this author Posted in Science, 25th June 2012 07:19 GMT Twenty-year-old models which have suggested serious ice loss in the eastern Antarctic have been compared with reality for the first time - and found to be wrong, so much so that it now appears that no ice is being lost at all. "Previous ocean models ... have predicted temperatures and melt rates that are too high, suggesting a significant mass loss in this region that is actually not taking place," says Tore Hattermann of the Norwegian Polar Institute, member of a team ...
World's first GM babies born
Post Date: 2012-06-28 13:03:05 by Jethro Tull
1 Comments
The world's first geneticallymodified humans have been created, it was revealed last night. The disclosure that 30 healthy babies were born after a series of experiments in the United States provoked another furious debate about ethics. So far, two of the babies have been tested and have been found to contain genes from three 'parents'. Fifteen of the children were born in the past three years as a result of one experimental programme at the Institute for Reproductive Medicine and Science of St Barnabas in New Jersey. The babies were born to women who had problems conceiving. Extra genes from a female donor were inserted into their eggs before they were fertilised in an attempt ...
Delusion is a big problem with the green crowd
Post Date: 2012-06-26 01:41:17 by farmfriend
0 Comments
Delusion is a big problem with the green crowd By Stephen Murgatroyd, Troy Media The draft text for discussion at Rio +20 - the UN conference on sustainable development - makes clear that the summit itself is a waste of energy and time. Even the environmental non-government organizations attending it think so. Jim Leape, international director-general of World Wildlife Fund, hoped that the document would be renegotiated: "It's pathetic. It's appalling. If this becomes the final text the last year has been a colossal waste of time." Friends of the Earth are even stronger in their disapproval, calling the plans "an epic failure." None of this surprises anyone. ...
Arctic once had extreme warm periods
Post Date: 2012-06-23 15:41:36 by farmfriend
0 Comments
Arctic once had extreme warm periods The Arctic went through ice-free periods of extreme warmth over the past 2.8 million years, based on a new analysis of deep sediment in Russia. The team led by Martin Melles of the University of Cologne, Germany, drilled into an iced-over lake formed by a meteorite impact on the Chukchi Peninsula in Siberia for the longest sediment core ever collected in the terrestrial Arctic. Since the meteorite struck an area of Lake El'gygytgyn that was not eroded by glaciers, the sediment record reaches back nearly 30 times further in time than ice cores from Greenland that cover the past 110,000 years. The sediment reveals periods of extreme warmth that ...
Green ‘drivel’ exposed - The godfather of global warming lowers the boom on climate change hysteria
Post Date: 2012-06-23 15:40:06 by farmfriend
6 Comments
Green ‘drivel’ exposed The godfather of global warming lowers the boom on climate change hysteria By Lorrie Goldstein ,Toronto Sun Two months ago, James Lovelock, the godfather of global warming, gave a startling interview to msnbc.com in which he acknowledged he had been unduly “alarmist” about climate change. The implications were extraordinary. Lovelock is a world-renowned scientist and environmentalist whose Gaia theory — that the Earth operates as a single, living organism — has had a profound impact on the development of global warming theory. Unlike many “environmentalists,” who have degrees in political science, Lovelock, until his ...
Placing weather modification mirors in space would reduce rainfall
Post Date: 2012-06-21 05:00:26 by Tatarewicz
1 Comments
Space mirrors will dry out US and Eurasia INSTALLING huge mirrors in space would help reverse global warming, but they would come at a price: less rain for the Americas and northern Eurasia. Previous studies have shown that geoengineering cannot restore both temperature and rain to previous levels, but they could not specify what a geoengineered climate would look like. Hauke Schmidt of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, and his colleagues played out the same simple scenario in four different climate models. In each one, he quadrupled carbon dioxide levels from pre-industrial levels. Then, to mimic the effect of space-borne mirrors, he reduced the amount of ...
Turtles fossilised in sex embrace
Post Date: 2012-06-20 12:38:25 by farmfriend
14 Comments
Turtles fossilised in sex embrace By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News Turtles killed as they were having sex and then fossilised in position have been described by scientists. The remains of the 47-million-year old animals were unearthed in the famous Messel Pit near Darmstadt, Germany. They were found as male-female pairs. In two cases, the males even had their tails tucked under their partners' as would be expected from the coital position. Details are carried in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters. Researchers think the turtles had initiated sex in the surface waters of the lake that once existed on the site, and were then overcome as they sank through ...
Microsoft unveils Surface Windows 8 tablets
Post Date: 2012-06-19 06:57:34 by Tatarewicz
0 Comments
The BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones: "This is a really interesting development" SmartGlass links up tablets Taking a look at Windows 8 Watch Microsoft has unveiled Surface - its own-brand family of tablets. The touchscreen computers will be powered by its upcoming Windows 8 system and contain a choice of an Intel or ARM-based processor. It allows the firm to challenge Apple's bestselling iPad with a device that can run standard applications such as its own Office programs and Photoshop. But it puts Microsoft in competition with other manufacturers planning to release tablets designed for Windows 8. The company's chief executive, Steve Ballmer, said he had wanted to give ...
Mysterious radiation burst recorded in ancient tree rings
Post Date: 2012-06-18 02:26:56 by Tatarewicz
0 Comments
Spike in carbon-14 levels indicates a massive cosmic event — but supernovae and solar flares ruled out. Just over 1,200 years ago, the planet was hit by an extremely intense burst of high-energy radiation of unknown cause, scientists studying tree-ring data have found. The radiation burst, which seems to have hit between ad 774 and ad 775, was detected by looking at the amounts of the radioactive isotope carbon-14 in tree rings that formed during the ad 775 growing season in the Northern Hemisphere. The increase in 14C levels is so clear that the scientists, led by Fusa Miyake, a cosmic-ray physicist from Nagoya University in Japan, conclude that the atmospheric level of 14C must ...
Tiny, the Mouse, Takes a Giant Step for Mankind
Post Date: 2012-06-15 06:40:43 by Tatarewicz
1 Comments
You’ve probably heard of Dolly the sheep, the world’s first cloned mammal. But you’ve probably never heard of Tiny the mouse...one of the first creatures ever created from “reprogrammed” adult cells. Don’t be fooled by this little mouse’s name, what Tiny represents in the world of regenerative medicine is anything but tiny... In July 2009, a team from the Beijing’s Institute of Zoology reported in the journal Nature that it created healthy, fertile animals (Tiny and its brethren) by using so-called pluripotent stem cells (iPS). IPS cells are adult cells that have been genetically reprogrammed back to a pluripotent state. A pluripotent cell is simply ...
New web domains could include .sex, .app and .pizza
Post Date: 2012-06-14 01:56:44 by Tatarewicz
0 Comments
Move over .com -- it might have to compete with suffixes such as .sex, .app and .fail after the body in charge of website domain names unveiled some 2,000 applications for new ones Wednesday. The US-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) revealed details of 1,930 requests for new web address endings, ranging from the general (.shop) to the highly specialised (.motorcycles). Many of the requests are from large companies such as Apple, Mitsubishi and IBM -- with Internet giant Google alone applying for over 100, including .google, .YouTube, and .lol -- Internet slang for "laugh out loud". "This is an historic day for the Internet and the two ...
Green Fuel from Carbon Dioxide
Post Date: 2012-06-14 01:37:36 by Tatarewicz
0 Comments
ScienceDaily (June 13, 2012) — Scientists agree that carbon dioxide (CO2) has an effect on global warming as a greenhouse gas, but we still pump tons and tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every day. A research team at the Freiburg Materials Research Center (FMF) led by the chemist Prof. Dr. Ingo Krossing has now developed a new system for producing methanol that uses CO2 and hydrogen. Methanol can, for example, be used as an environmentally friendly alternative for gasoline. The goal of the scientists is to harness the power of CO2 on a large scale and integrate it into the utilization cycle as a sustainable form of energy production. In order to produce methanol, Krossing's ...
Early experience prunes brain wiring
Post Date: 2012-06-13 03:45:24 by Tatarewicz
0 Comments
ScienceDaily (June 6, 2012) — New research shows mice brains are 'very wired up' at birth, and suggests experience selects which connections to keep. Ask the average person the street how the brain develops, and they'll likely tell you that the brain's wiring is built as newborns first begin to experience the world. With more experience, those connections are strengthened, and new branches are built as they learn and grow. A new study conducted in a Harvard lab, however, suggests that just the opposite is true. As reported on June 7 in the journal Neuron, a team of researchers led by Jeff Lichtman, the Jeremy R. Knowles Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology, ...
Nebraska corn fields hit by disease
Post Date: 2012-06-13 01:37:13 by Tatarewicz
1 Comments
(Reuters) - U.S. plant scientists have found the debilitating disease Goss's Wilt in multiple corn fields across Nebraska, raising fears of yield loss in the No. 3 U.S. corn state. The disease is not widespread at this time, but oozing leaves and leaf lesions have been noted on corn plants. Testing has confirmed the Goss's bacterial wilt and blight in corn samples received from south central and eastern Nebraska, according to University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) researchers. "It's too early to tell" how destructive the disease will be this season, Tamra Jackson-Ziems, extension plant pathologist with the UNL Department of Plant Pathology, said on Tuesday. The ...
Calibrate your mouse
Post Date: 2012-06-12 08:39:04 by James Deffenbach
6 Comments
Calibrate your mouse Funny, but I never knew this even after all these years of using my personal computer. MOUSE CALIBRATION: You should actually do this every year. Even more often if you spend a lot of time on the computer. This was recommended by Kim Komando (the computer guru) in one of her recent emails. I was surprised to see how well it works, and how far off mine was. To re-calibrate your mouse, click and hold on the capital S below, then drag it toward the small g. If it doesn't work immediately, you might want to clean your mouse, as the calibration is off. Shit! You'll believe anything
Molecular Imaging Finds Link Between Low Dopamine Levels and Aggression
Post Date: 2012-06-12 03:36:36 by Tatarewicz
1 Comments
ScienceDaily (June 11, 2012) — Out of control competitive aggression could be a result of a lagging neurotransmitter called dopamine, say researchers presenting a study at the Society of Nuclear Medicine's 2012 Annual Meeting. During a computer game against a putative cheating adversary, participants who had a lower capacity to synthesize this neurotransmitter in the brain were more distracted from their basic motivation to earn money and were more likely to act out with aggression. For many people, anger is an almost automatic response to life's challenges. In clinical psychiatry, scientists look at not only the impact of aggressive behavior on the individual, their loved ...
Big Step Taken to Develop Nuclear Fusion Power
Post Date: 2012-06-12 03:04:16 by Tatarewicz
0 Comments
ScienceDaily (June 8, 2012) — Researchers have successfully developed a key technology in developing an experimental fusion reactor. Imagine a world without human-made climate change, energy crunches or reliance on foreign oil. It may sound like a dream world, but University of Tennessee, Knoxville, engineers have made a giant step toward making this scenario a reality. UT researchers have successfully developed a key technology in developing an experimental reactor that can demonstrate the feasibility of fusion energy for the power grid. Nuclear fusion promises to supply more energy than the nuclear fission used today but with far fewer risks. Mechanical, aerospace and biomedical ...
New primitive primate unearthed in Myanmar
Post Date: 2012-06-10 21:03:05 by farmfriend
2 Comments
New primitive primate unearthed in Myanmar Fossil highlights critical step in primate evolution Lee Flohr From just four teeth, an international team of researchers have identified a new species of anthropoid primate – the ancestors of humans, apes and monkeys – that’s approximately 37-million years old. Weighing barely 100 grams – about as much as a small stick of butter – and unearthed at the Pondaung Formations of Myanmar, Afrasia djijidae may help bridge primate migration from Asia to Africa. “We’ve found nearly the same taxa in both Asia and Africa,” Jean-Jacques Jaeger, study co-author and paleontologist at the University of Poitiers in ...
'Sexual depravity' of penguins that Antarctic scientist dared not reveal
Post Date: 2012-06-10 20:38:55 by farmfriend
2 Comments
'Sexual depravity' of penguins that Antarctic scientist dared not reveal Landmark polar research about the Adelie penguin's sex life by Captain Scott's expedition, deemed too shocking for the public 100 years ago, is unearthed at the Natural History Museum Robin McKie, science editor guardian.co.uk, Saturday 9 June 2012 06.31 EDT It was the sight of a young male Adélie penguin attempting to have sex with a dead female that particularly unnerved George Murray Levick, a scientist with the 1910-13 Scott Antarctic Expedition. No such observation had ever been recorded before, as far as he knew, and Levick, a typical Edwardian Englishman, was horrified. Blizzards and ...
Arctic Ice Melt Is Setting Stage for Severe Winters
Post Date: 2012-06-09 04:26:01 by Tatarewicz
2 Comments
ScienceDaily (June 6, 2012) — The dramatic melt-off of Arctic sea ice due to climate change is hitting closer to home than millions of Americans might think. That's because melting Arctic sea ice can trigger a domino effect leading to increased odds of severe winter weather outbreaks in the Northern Hemisphere's middle latitudes -- think the "Snowmageddon" storm that hamstrung Washington, D.C., during February 2010. Cornell's Charles H. Greene, professor of earth and atmospheric sciences, and Bruce C. Monger, senior research associate in the same department, detail this phenomenon in a paper published in the June issue of the journal Oceanography. ...
Japan team create liver from stem cells: report
Post Date: 2012-06-09 01:16:52 by Tatarewicz
0 Comments
Japanese researchers have created a functioning human liver from stemcells, a report said Friday, raising hopes for the manufacture of artificial organs for those in need of transplants. A team of scientists transplanted induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells into the body of a mouse, where it grew into a small, but working, human liver, the Yomiuri Shimbun said. Stemcells are frequently harvested from embryos, which are then discarded, a practice some people find morally objectionable. But iPS cells -- which have the potential to develop into any body tissue -- can be taken from adults. A team led by professor Hideki Taniguchi at Yokohama City University developed human iPS cells into ...
Latest [Newer] 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 [Older]
|