Trailing like a serpent's spine along the western coast of South America, the Andes are the world's longest continental mountain range and the highest range outside Asia, with an average elevation of 13,000 feet.
Experimenting on a university dormitory that was scheduled to be torn down, NIST fire researchers have demonstrated that the correct combination of automatic fire sprinkler systems, smoke alarms and closed doors provided enough time and safe conditions for residents to escape safely and for fire fighters to perform their job without undue hazard.
Physicists at NIST have built and tested a device for trapping ions that potentially could process dozens at once with the most versatile control of any trap demonstrated to date, an advance towards the ultimate goal of building a practical quantum computer.
Scientists at the University of Delaware have developed a new method for producing proteins critical to research on cancer, Alzheimer's, and other diseases.
Ryerson University Chemical Engineering students have discovered a potential solution to the rising levels of pharmaceuticals ending up in the water supply, particularly worrisome around hospitals and long-term care facilities, where pharmaceutical use is heavy. The foursome has designed an advanced wastewater treatment system which would remove 90 per cent of pharmaceuticals and endocrine-disrupting compounds (EDCs) using commercially available technology. Currently no such sewage treatment plant exists in North America.
Walter O’Brien, director of Virginia Tech’s Center for Turbomachinery and Propulsion Research, has received a patent for his design of a novel ignitor for combustion and supersonic flows, a device that may prove useful in Mach 5 or hypersonic speed vehicles.
On March 30, 2010, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will begin colliding subatomic particles at previously unattainable energies, and McGill students will be onsite eagerly awaiting the results. The LHC tests will open a new era of discovery about the basic nature of the Universe, and McGill faculty, post-doctorates and graduate students are on-site in Switzerland making important contributions to the research.
Microorganisms can indeed live in extreme environments, but the ones that do are highly adapted to survive and little else, according to a collaboration that includes Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Joint Genome Institute (JGI) and the University of Oklahoma.
School of Pharmacy pinpoints cinnamon and ginseng as potential life-extending ingredients in two popular herbal mixtures.
Using a delicate underground instrument, physicists are measuring some of the faintest and rarest particles ever detected with the greatest precision yet achieved. Geo-neutrino data reveal for the first time a well defined signal from the extremely rare geo-neutrino particle from deep inside Earth.
Forget top-to-bottom only. New Cornell University evolutionary biology research shows how plants at the bottom of the food chain have evolved mechanisms that influence ecosystem dynamics as well.
Using the latest in aberration-corrected electron microscopy, researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and their colleagues have obtained the first images that distinguish individual light atoms such as boron, carbon, nitrogen and oxygen.
Bony fish like the tiny zebrafish have a remarkable ability that mammals can only dream of: if you lop off a chunk of their heart they swim sluggishly for a few days but within a month appear perfectly normal. How they accomplish this - or, more importantly, why we can't - is one of the significant questions in regenerative medicine today.
Dolphins, whales and porpoises have extraordinarily small balance organs, and scientists have long wondered why. Now a study at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has contradicted a leading theory, which held that the animals moved their heads so vigorously that they had to have smaller, less responsive balance organs to avoid overwhelming their senses.
A new model of the Earth, 20 years in the making, describes a dynamic three-dimensional puzzle of planetary proportions.
Tiny generators developed at the University of Michigan could produce enough electricity from random, ambient vibrations to power a wristwatch, pacemaker or wireless sensor.
Clean water is scarce and becoming more so in many cities around the world. According to the World Health Organization, between 1990 and 2006, the number of urban dwellers without access to clean drinking water grew from 107 million to 137 million.
Like a film director cutting out extraneous footage to create a blockbuster, the cellular machine called the spliceosome snips out unwanted stretches of genetic material and joins the remaining pieces to fashion a template for protein production.
A quest that began over a decade ago with a chance observation has reached a milestone: the identification of a gene that may regulate regeneration in mammals. The absence of this single gene, called p21, confers a healing potential in mice long thought to have been lost through evolution and reserved for creatures like flatworms, sponges, and some species of salamander. In a report published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from The Wistar Institute demonstrate that mice that lack the p21 gene gain the ability to regenerate lost or damaged tissue.
Using a novel light activation technique, Scripps Research Institute scientists have been able to turn molecules with only a modest ability to fight specific proteins into virtual protein destroyers.
The human body operates by a precisely regulated interplay of different cell types such as blood, nerve and muscle cells. Scientists in Vienna, Austria, and in Martinsried, Germany, have succeeded in identifying all genes of the fruit fly Drosophila that play a role in the development and function of muscles. The work has now been published in Nature.
Dr. Marc McKee, of McGill’s Faculty of Dentistry and the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology, is collaborating closely with Enobia Pharma Inc, a Quebec biotech company, to develop innovative treatments for serious genetic bone diseases. McKee’s research looks into the reasons why calcium-phosphate mineral fails to crystallize properly to form strong bones and teeth.
In possible breakthrough for creating crack-proof materials, Northeastern scientists are first to develop computer models for how cracks form and spread in solids, from synthetics to human bone.
Northeastern engineering professor leading effort to advance antenna technology for quicker and more efficient wireless communications.
Cornell researchers have found a protein that may lead to a new way to control mosquitoes that spread dengue fever, yellow fever and other diseases when they feed on humans: Prevent them from urinating as they feed on blood. (American Journal of Physiology, March 4, 2010)
Scientists are beginning to find out why people with Parkinson’s disease often feel socially awkward. Parkinson’s patients find it harder to recognize expressions of emotion in other people’s faces and voices, report two studies published by the American Psychological Association.
The Maurepas Swamp, an important wetland located near New Orleans, is on a clear path toward becoming open water unless a Mississippi River diversion or some other source of freshwater is introduced.
Focused on job creation, leaders in biotechnology and life sciences will convene in Chicago, Illinois this spring to evaluate the role of biotechnology parks in the economic recovery. The Association of University Research Parks’ (AURP) BioParks 2010 will bring together executives from research and science parks around the world to learn the latest on building communities of biotechnology innovation.
The final publication of the Guide for Applying the Risk Management Framework to Federal Information Systems: A Security Life Cycle Approach (NIST Special Publication 800-37, Revision 1) is now available from the NIST Computer Security Resource Center.
A team of researchers from NIST and several universities has demonstrated for the first time the specific activity of the protein NEIL3, one of a group responsible for maintaining the integrity of DNA in humans and other mammals. Their work sheds new light on a potentially important source of harmful DNA mutations.
Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have discovered a new method for predicting – with up to 99 percent accuracy – the fate of stem cells. Using advanced computer vision technology to detect subtle cell movements that are impossible to discern with the human eye, researchers can successfully forecast how a stem cell will split and what key characteristics the daughter cells will exhibit.
A new study using mice suggests that a repeated stressful situation that triggers the animals’ natural “fight-or-flight” response may actually enhance their ability to fight disease when re-exposed to the same pathogen.
The massive, 8.8-magnitude earthquake that struck Chile Feb. 27 occurred in an offshore zone that was under increased stress caused by a 1960 quake of magnitude 9.5, according to geologist Jian Lin of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI).
Exerting delicate control over a pair of atoms within a mere seven-millionths-of-a-second window of opportunity, physicists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison created an atomic circuit that may help quantum computing become a reality.
Physicists from the Japanese-led multinational T2K collaboration announced today that they had made the first detection of a neutrino which had travelled all the way under Japan from their neutrino beamline at the J-PARC facility in Tokai village (about an hour north of Tokyo by train) to the gigantic Super-Kamiokande underground detector near the west coast of Japan, 295 km (185 miles) away from Tokai. Stony Brook University has been the leading US institution in the T2K experiment.
UCLA researchers have discovered what they describe as a biochemical link between misery and death. In addition, they found a specific genetic variation in some individuals that seems to disconnect that link, rendering them more biologically resilient in the face of adversity.
In a technological advance that its developers are likening to the cell phone and wireless Internet access, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) scientists and engineers have devised an undersea optical communications system that—complemented by acoustics—enables a virtual revolution in high-speed undersea data collection and transmission.
In a paper appearing in the Feb. 24 issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London A, Virginia Tech Engineering Science and Mechanics Professor Hassan Aref, and his colleague Johan Roenby at the Technical University of Denmark shed new light on the chaotic motion of a solid body moving through a fluid. They claim to have discovered two basic mechanisms that lead to chaotic motion of the body as it interacts with its vortex wake. The work may lead to better understanding and control of real body-vortex interactions.
Using large-scale supercomputer calculations, researchers have analyzed how the placement of metallic contacts on graphene changes the electron transport properties of the material as a factor of junction length, width and orientation.
A class of molecules whose size, structure and chemical composition have been optimized for photonic use could provide the demanding combination of properties needed to serve as the foundation for low-power, high-speed all-optical signal processing.
University of Utah scientists developed an easier way to predict snowfall amounts and density – fluffy powder or wet cement. The method has been adopted by the National Weather Service for use throughout Utah and could be adjusted for use anywhere.
Depicting a cause-and-effect scenario that spans thousands of miles, a scientist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego and his collaborators discovered that ocean waves originating along the Pacific coasts of North and South America impact Antarctic ice shelves and could play a role in their catastrophic collapse.
A Dalhousie University researcher is studying how restricting sleep affects the behaviors, cognition and emotions of children aged eight to 12 years old.
If bad bacteria lurk in your system, chances are they will bump into the immune system’s protective cells whose job is gobbling germs. The catch is that these do-gooders, known as macrophages, ingest and destroy only those infectious invaders that they can securely hook and reel in.
The ATS and the European Respiratory Society have issued official standards for the quantitative assessment of lung structure.
An artificial foot that recycles energy otherwise wasted in between steps could make it easier for amputees to walk, its developers say.
Colored chickpeas have significantly higher antioxidant qualities than the regular cream and beige color varieties, according to a new study in the Journal of Food Science, published by the Institute of Food Technologists.
Infants born to bilingual mothers exhibit different language preferences than infants born to mothers speaking only one language. The results suggest that bilingual infants, along with monolingual infants, are able to discriminate between the two languages, providing a mechanism from the first moments of life that helps ensure bilingual infants do not confuse their two languages.
Research by Johns Hopkins sensory biologists studying fruit flies, has revealed a critical step in fly vision. Humans with problems in this same step suffer retinal dystrophies, which manifest as visual defects ranging from mild visual impairments to complete blindness. The article, published Jan. 26 in Current Biology paves the way for using the fruit fly to screen for therapies to treat human retinal degeneration.
A new additive manufacturing process for mixing tough metals with ceramic materials and depositing, layer by layer, the mixed materials in the form of pastes could lead to stronger, heat-resistant, three-dimensional components for future space exploration, says a researcher at Missouri University of Science and Technology.
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