How climate change impacts food productionThe old adage, We are what we eat, may be the latest recipe for success when it comes to curbing the perils of global climate warming. Despite the recent popular attention to the distance that food travels from farm to plate, aka food miles, Carnegie Mellon scientists Christopher L. Weber and H. Scott Matthews argue in an upcoming article in the prestigious Environmental Science & Technology journal that it is dietary choice, not food miles,........Go to the Geography-blog (Added on 4/21/2008 6:17:41 PM)
Sharper imags: sports vision clinicThe standard eye chart only covers letters and numbers, but athletes need above average vision to track balls hurtling toward them at alarming speeds. To test those special skills, a University of Houston optometrist has founded the Sports Vision Performance Center, a facility where athletes perform while a strobe light is flashing, play tag with a board of lights and engage in other activities designed to improve their visual abilities.
The........Go to the Sports-blog (Added on 4/21/2008 6:10:48 PM)
How strong is a hurricane?Knowing how powerful a hurricane is, before it hits land, can help to save lives or to avoid the enormous costs of an unnecessary evacuation. Some MIT scientists think there may be a better, cheaper way of getting that crucial information.
So far, there's only one surefire way of measuring the strength of a hurricane: Sending airplanes to fly right through the most intense winds and into the eye of the storm, carrying out wind-speed........Go to the Geography-blog (Added on 4/10/2008 9:27:56 PM)
Grand Canyon may be as old as dinosaursNew geological evidence indicates the Grand Canyon may be so old that dinosaurs once lumbered along its rim, as per a research studyby scientists from the University of Colorado at Boulder and the California Institute of Technology.
The team used a technique known as radiometric dating to show the Grand Canyon may have formed more than 55 million years ago, pushing back its assumed origins by 40 million to 50 million years. The scientists........Go to the Archeology-blog (Added on 4/10/2008 9:05:19 PM)
Forecasters Implement New Hurricane-Tracking TechniqueA new technique that helps forecasters continuously monitor landfalling hurricanes, giving them frequent and detailed images of a storm's location, will be implemented this summer.
The new system, developed by National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., and the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, D.C., will be implemented at the National Hurricane........Go to the Technology-blog (Added on 4/10/2008 8:08:10 PM)
Pressing onPressing On (Return of the Phoebe) from the Undiscovery Channel on Vimeo
Ah, to be as single-minded as a phoebe! To sing for the sheer joy of it, one’s message reduced to the bare fundamentals
I am here
Life is good
Gimme some sugar
Isn’t that really what we’re all trying to do, as artists and writers
Apparently not. “Whether a person blogs to make a little money, to influence opinion or just for sheer........Go to the Media-blog (Added on 4/9/2008 8:22:53 PM)
14-year-old CEO makes chemistry a gameAge seems to be no obstacle when it comes to starting a business. Thats the case with 14-year-old Anshul Samar, CEO of Alchemist Empire, Inc., who invented a trading card game, Elementeo, that aims to teach chemistry to students in a fun, unusual way.
At the 235th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society in New Orleans, Samar will present his inventive card game. While other 14-year olds play on their Xbox, this precocious CEO hopes........Go to the Chemistry-blog (Added on 4/8/2008 9:54:59 PM)
Money Doesn't Grow on Trees, But Gasoline MightScientists have made a breakthrough in the development of "green gasoline," a liquid identical to standard gasoline yet created from sustainable biomass sources like switchgrass and poplar trees.
Reporting in the cover article of the April 7, 2008 issue of Chemistry & Sustainability, Energy & Materials (ChemSusChem), chemical engineer and National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER awardee George Huber of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst........Go to the Technology-blog (Added on 4/7/2008 10:43:06 PM)
'Revolutionary' CO2 maps zoom in on greenhouse gas sourcesWhere CO2 is being emitted interactive map of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels has observed that the emissions aren't all where we thought.
"For example, we've been attributing too a number of emissions to the northeastern United States, and it's looking like the southeastern U.S. is a much larger source than we had estimated previously," says Kevin Gurney, an assistant professor of earth and atmospheric science at Purdue........Go to the Geography-blog (Added on 4/7/2008 9:16:34 PM)
The Flight of the Red Balloon"Like his 2004 film Cafe Lumière, Hou Hsiao-hsien''s sublime new movie The Flight of the Red Balloon finds the director in a foreign country paying homage to another filmmaker," writes Chris Wisniewski at indieWIRE. "With Lumiere, Yasujiro Ozu was Hou''s reference point and Tokyo his canvas; here, Hou reimagines Albert Lamorisse''s classic 1956 short The Red Balloon as a Parisian family melodrama.
"A remarkably rich, rewarding, and restful........Go to the Entertainment-blog (Added on 4/6/2008 7:14:34 PM)
Sense of Smell and Parkinson's DiseaseIn the earliest stage of Parkinson's disease, impaired sense of smell can occur. So that this means that an impaired sense of smell indicate the development of Parkinson's disease
According to researchers, smell impairment can precede the development of PD in men by at least four years
The results showed that an odor identification deficit can predate the development of PD by at least four years, although it was not a strong........Go to the Health-blog (Added on 4/6/2008 7:28:13 AM)
Yamaha Recalls 2008 Rhino 450 and 700Yamaha Recalls 2008 Rhino 450 and 700 due to possible brake failure.
About 7,800 units affected. The brake caliper on the left front wheel could have been made incorrectly, resulting in brake fluid leaking. This can cause a loss of braking and control of the vehicle, posing a serious safety risk to the driver and passenger. There have not been any reported accidents or injuries due to this possible defect.
Consumers should immediately........Go to the Auto-blog (Added on 4/6/2008 7:10:12 AM)
Golf Digest's "Big Contest"Courtesy: ExpandingKnowledge.co
Torrey Pines, site of the 2008 U.S. Ope
How do you spell gimmick
Well, if you work at Golf Digest magazine, you spell it "U S O p e n C o n t e s t"........Go to the Sports-blog (Added on 4/5/2008 11:42:03 AM)
Computer System Consistently Makes Most Accurate NCAA PicksSports professionals and fans get pretty emotional about their picks for the NCAA basketball tournament each year, and that emotion often clouds their judgment.
But three engineering professors at the Georgia Institute of Technology have created a computer ranking system, called LRMC, that consistently predicts NCAA basketball rankings more accurately than the AP poll of sportswriters and the ESPN/USA Today poll of coaches, formulas (the........Go to the Sports-blog (Added on 4/3/2008 8:26:30 PM)
Electricity and gas consumption at a glancePeople who want to save energy should always keep an eye on their consumption. The EWE Box offers customers a neat solution: It enables private households to monitor their electricity and gas consumption whenever they want - and save costs thanks to new pricing models.
Once a year, someone from the electricity or gas works comes to read the meter. Soon afterwards, the customer receives an invoice listing the power consumption for the whole........Go to the Technology-blog (Added on 4/1/2008 10:19:38 PM)
Solving Mystery Of Polyketide Drug FormationA number of top-selling drugs used to treat cancer and lower cholesterol are made from organic compounds called polyketides, which are found in nature but historically difficult for chemists to alter and reproduce in large quantities.
For the first time, researchers at UC Irvine have discovered how polyketides form their ringlike shape, making it easier for chemists to manipulate them into new drugs.
The key, they found, is an enzyme........Go to the Chemistry-blog (Added on 4/1/2008 9:56:32 PM)
Is it a bird, is it a plane, no it's a bridge!A government lab in Teddington has taken on its biggest sample for analysis to date a 14 tonne foot-bridge.
The National Physical Laboratory (NPL) is a world-leading centre of excellence in developing and applying the most accurate measurement standards, science and technology. For over 100 years it has been the UKs National Measurement Institute and provides highly accurate measurement and analysis for public and private sector benefit........Go to the Technology-blog (Added on 4/1/2008 9:07:03 PM)
Geologist decries floodplain developmentMidwesterners have to be wondering: Will April be the cruelest month?.
Patterns in the Midwest this spring are eerily reminiscent of 1993 and 1994, back-to-back years of serious flooding. The great flood of 1993 caused nearly $20 billion of economic damage, damaging or destroying more than 50,000 homes and killing at least 38 people.
Parallels this year include abnormally high levels of precipitation in late winter and early spring, and........Go to the Geography-blog (Added on 4/1/2008 9:04:45 PM)
Fear of messing up may cause whites to avoid blacksDemocratic consultant Donna Brazile brought home Americas reluctance to talk openly about race in a New York Times article that preceded the Barack Obama speech that now has the whole nation buzzing. In essence, she said in her quote, any serious discussion about race has the effect of clearing a room.
Braziles remark and the presidential hopefuls groundbreaking speech about a subject that politicians generally tiptoe around in public hint........Go to the Media-blog (Added on 4/1/2008 8:46:26 PM)
Small is Big During NanoDaysApril 2008 witnesses the launch of two efforts--with major funding from the National Science Foundation--that are intended to promote understanding of nanotechnology among the general public. Nanotechnology is the art and science of manipulating matter at the nanoscale (down to 1/100,000 the width of a human hair) to create new and unique materials and products. It is also the subject of "Nanotechnology: The Power of Small," a three-part,........Go to the Technology-blog (Added on 4/1/2008 8:28:23 PM)
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Arctic Ice More Vulnerable to Sunny WeatherThe shrinking expanse of Arctic sea ice is increasingly vulnerable to summer sunshine, new research concludes. The study, by researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and Colorado State University (CSU), finds that uncommonly sunny weather contributed to last summer's record loss of Arctic ice, while similar weather conditions in past summers do not appear to have had comparable impacts.
The study, which draws on........Go to the Geography-blog (Added on 4/21/2008 8:05:56 PM)
Wanted: Forty-thousand More Health IT ProfessionalsStudy by OHSU expert says a 40 percent hike in IT workforce will be needed to move U.S. healthcare toward a paperless system that controls costs and reduces medical errors.
If the U.S. healthcare system moves toward wider adoption of advanced information technology systems to control health care costs, reduce medical errors and improve patient care, it will need at least 40,000 additional health IT professionals - or almost 40 percent more........Go to the Jobs-blog (Added on 4/17/2008 7:38:48 PM)
Dam removal increases property valuesTwo new studies appearing in Contemporary Economic Policy explore the impact of dam removal on local property values and find that property values increase after dams are removed.
Lynne Y. Lewis, Ph.D., of Bates College and scientists utilized geographic information systems mapping software to examine the effects of small hydropower dams on property values in Maine. The study examined the effects on property values of the Edwards dam in........Go to the Geography-blog (Added on 4/17/2008 7:33:32 PM)
Hurricane Forecasters Adopt NCAR Radar TechniqueThe National Hurricane Center will implement a new technique this summer, developed by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), to continually monitor landfalling storms in the United States. The system, which relies on existing coastal Doppler radars, provides details on hurricane winds and central pressure every six minutes, indicating whether a hurricane is gathering strength........Go to the Geography-blog (Added on 4/10/2008 9:19:41 PM)
Strong Labor Market for Scientists and EngineersScience and engineering workforce availability in the United States is under serious scrutiny by observers who worry about a decline in the nation's ability to fill future demand. However, three newly published National Science Foundation (NSF) reports show increasing supplies of researchers and engineers, as well as a strong labor market.
As per NSF data, the number of individuals working in science and engineering (S&E) occupations........Go to the Jobs-blog (Added on 4/10/2008 8:14:51 PM)
Don't Create the Wonder PollutantCarbon nanotubes are 10,000 times thinner than a human hair, yet stronger than steel and more durable than diamonds. They conduct heat and electricity with efficiency that rivals copper wires and silicon chips, with possible uses in everything from concrete and clothes to bicycle parts and electronics. The have been hailed as the next "wonder material" for what could become a multi-billion dollar manufacturing industry in the 21st century. But........Go to the Technology-blog (Added on 4/8/2008 10:27:59 PM)
Sea salt worsens coastal air pollutionAir pollution in the worlds busiest ports and shipping regions may be markedly worse than previously suspected, as per a new study showing that industrial and shipping pollution is exacerbated when it combines with sunshine and salty sea air.
In a paper published in this weeks advance online edition of the journal Nature Geoscience, a team of scientists that included University of Calgary chemistry professor Hans Osthoff report that the........Go to the Geography-blog (Added on 4/8/2008 9:49:27 PM)
NOAA Aircraft to Probe Arctic PollutionNOAA researchers are now flying through springtime Arctic pollution to find out why the region is warming - and summertime sea ice is melting - faster than predicted. Some 35 NOAA scientists are gathering with government and university colleagues in Fairbanks, Alaska, to conduct the study through April 23.
"The Arctic is changing before our eyes," said A.R. Ravishankara, director of the chemistry division at NOAA's Earth System Research........Go to the Geography-blog (Added on 4/7/2008 10:39:49 PM)
As nanotech goes mainstreamNanotechnology is now available in a store near you.
Valued for its antibacterial and odor-fighting properties, nanoparticle silver is becoming the star attraction in a range of products from socks to bandages to washing machines. But as silvers benefits propel it to the forefront of consumer nanomaterials, researchers are recommending a closer examination of the unforeseen environmental and health consequences of nanosilver.
The general........Go to the Technology-blog (Added on 4/6/2008 8:51:36 PM)
Gunshot residue analysis on a single gunpowder particleResearchers in Texas are reporting development of an highly dependable, rapid, and inexpensive new method for identifying the presence of gunshot residue (GSR). The test fills a GSR-detection gap that results from wider use of green lead free ammunition.
It requires only a single speck of GSR smaller than the period at the end of this sentence and could boost the accuracy of one of the most widely used tests employed at crime scenes........Go to the Chemistry-blog (Added on 4/6/2008 8:29:29 PM)
Corymbia 'Summer Beauty'Connor is responsible for today''s write-up
Thanks to kjbeath@Flickr (and Ken''s photo site) for this wonderful shot (original via UBCBG Botany Photo of the Day pool)
Corymbia ''Summer Beauty'' is a hybrid between Corymbia ficifolia, commonly known as the red-flower gum and, Corymbia ptychocarpa, commonly known as the swamp bloodwood. These two species are native to northwestern Australia
As kjbeath noted, prior to 1995 these two........Go to the Botany-blog (Added on 4/6/2008 6:59:46 PM)
Magnesium NanobladesResearchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have created tiny nanoblades made out of magnesium. They used oblique angle deposition, which was previously thought to always create cylindrical structures like nanorods or nanosprings........Go to the Technology-blog (Added on 4/6/2008 6:05:20 AM)
MLB And NFL Players© ConspiracyofHappines
Baseball season begins today (okay, it started last week in Japan, but that doesn't really count), and for many football fans, it is a way to fill the summer months until college and NFL action begin again. With that, here's a look at some players who were talented enough to excel at both sports
- Jim Thorpe: Thorpe, one of America's greatest athletes ever, played baseball from 1913 to 1919, from........Go to the Sports-blog (Added on 4/5/2008 12:45:17 PM)
The voyage to AmericaProfessor Eske Willerslev was surprised by the results of the DNA tests conducted by himself and colleagues on samples of what turned out to be fossilised human faeces found in deep caves in the Oregon desert. The oldest of the droppings have been carbon-dated to be approximately 14,340 years old. Willerslevs faeces samples clearly contain two main genetic types of Asian origin that are unique to present-day North American Indians. Not only is........Go to the Geography-blog (Added on 4/3/2008 8:44:07 PM)
Soccer robots compete for the titleRobot soccer is an ambitious high-tech competition for universities, research institutes and industry. Several major tournaments are planned for 2008, the biggest of which is the 'RoboCup German Open'. From April 21-25, over 80 teams of researchers from more than 15 countries are expected to face off in Hall 25 at the Hannover Messe. In a series of soccer matches in several leagues, they will be putting the latest technologies on display. The........Go to the Sports-blog (Added on 4/1/2008 10:15:10 PM)
Can a laser scanner drive a car?A car that navigates city streets without a driver - steered only by a computer? That might seem impossible to a number of. But scientists from Fraunhofer and the FU Berlin are presenting such an automated vehicle at this year's Hannover Messe on April 21 through 25, 2008 (Hall 25, Stand H25). Its core element is a three-dimensional laser scanner.
Can a computer steer a car through a city without a driver's help? The 'Spirit of Berlin', a........Go to the Auto-blog (Added on 4/1/2008 10:11:37 PM)
356 animal inclusions trapped in 100 million years old opaque amberPaleontologists from the University of Rennes (France) and the ESRF have found the presence of 356 animal inclusions in completely opaque amber from mid-Cretaceous sites of Charentes (France). The team used the X-rays of the European light source to image two kilogrammes of the fossil tree resin with a technique that allows rapid survey of large amounts of opaque amber. At present this is the only way to discover inclusions in fully opaque........Go to the Archeology-blog (Added on 4/1/2008 9:55:04 PM)
Some Migratory Birds Can't Find Success In Urban AreasNew research finds fresh evidence that urbanization in the United States threatens the populations of some species of migratory birds.
But the six-year study also refutes one of the most widely accepted explanations of why urban areas are so hostile to some kinds of birds.
Most ecologists have assumed that common nest predators in urban areas - such as house cats and raccoons - were destroying eggs or killing young birds in greater........Go to the Biology-blog (Added on 4/1/2008 8:58:42 PM)
Rich Terrorist, Poor TerroristNew research suggests political freedom and geographic factors contribute significantly to causes of terrorism, challenging the common view that terrorism is rooted in poverty.
"There is no significant relationship between a country's wealth and level of terrorism once other factors like the country's level of political freedom are taken into account," says Alberto Abadie, public policy professor at Harvard University's Kennedy School of........Go to the Media-blog (Added on 4/1/2008 8:39:44 PM)
Are women voters more likely to vote for female candidates?This research, which was conducted by University of Wisconsins Kathleen Dolan, examined the National Election Study (NES) data, which provided information about voters reactions to female candidates and whether gender affinity was correlation to the election booth decision. The findings provided interesting results.
While the research looked at gender affinity, and such other issues as the desire for gender-specific representation on certain........Go to the Media-blog (Added on 3/31/2008 9:17:58 PM)
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