News Articles

Michael Richmond of  Rochester Institute of Technology created a simple example for how to determine the astronomical unit - the distance from Earth to the Sun and therefore the basis for all modern measurements in space  for the CLEA workshop in 2004, the last time we had a transit of Venus - and it won't happen again in our lifetimes so tomorrow is the last chance to see it.

A new durable, environmentally-benign (we all hope) blue pigment has also been found to have unusual characteristics in reflecting heat - it's much better at it than most blue pigments in use.  The compound just received patent approval and was discovered by Oregon State University scientists who were instead studying some materials for their electrical properties.

Very different complex networks, like global air traffic and neural networks, share very similar 'backbones', say a group of mathematicians, and by stripping each network down to their essential nodes and links, they found each network possesses a skeleton which shares common features, much like vertebrates do.Mammals have evolved to look very different despite a common underlying structure and now it appears real-world complex networks have common descent in a similar way.

Tuesday, June 5th, 2012 at 3:03 PM PDT (California), Venus will do something we on Earth will have witnessed for only the eighth since the invention of the telescope - it will cross in front of the sun. This transit is among the rarest of planetary alignments and it has an interesting cycle. Two Venus transits always occur within eight years of each other and then there is a break of either 105 or 121 years before it happens again.

What evolutionary reason would tiny insects 100 million years ago have for collecting and transporting Gingko pollen?  They had highly specialized hairs with a ringed structure to increase their ability to collect pollen grains. Their ringed hairs cannot have grown due to an evolutionary selection benefiting the trees so ancient thysanopterans, so-called thrips (a group of minute insects of less than 2 mm in length) must have fed their larvae with pollen. This suggests that this species formed colonies with larvae living in the ovules of some kind of gingko for shelter and protection, and female insects transporting pollen from the male Gingko cones to the female ovules to feed the larvae and at the same time pollinate the trees.

Diagnostic tools are getting small, small enough to fit in a person's pocket, and one huge benefit for medical researchers would be a way to easily move and even mix small samples of a liquid. A newly patented surface moves drops along certain paths - all it takes is a shake.

Honduras is now a permanent shark sanctuary so any shark fins found are illegal - the International Union for Conservation of Nature says that 30 percent of all shark populations around the world are threatened or near threatened with extinction. 

The remains of newborn twin girls have been found in the archaeological site of Sant Miquel d'Olèrdola in Catalonia and it is expected that they belong to two girls between 38 and 40 weeks of gestation, who were buried at the same time in the same grave with their legs entwined.The remains date between the middle of the 4th century B.C. to the beginning of the 2nd century B.C. and are the first bone remains of twins to be recorded in the Iberian peninsula.

If you think about it rationally, sex may be fun but it's too much work and, from a reproduction standpoint,  the payoff is uncertain. Scientists have speculated for a long time on why all living things don't simply make like amoebas and split.Scientists believe that sexual reproduction offers two big advantages: It can sweep bad mutations out of the gene pool more quickly. Also, by shuffling parents' genetic material each generation, it increases the likelihood that new genetic combinations will arise that help organisms adapt to their environment.

Conservatives give more money to charity, studies show. This makes some sense; liberals believe in sharing wealth already and advocate policies reflecting that while conservatives advocate smaller government and greater individual initiative.But why do people in those political groups give to one cause over another? According to a new analysis in the International Journal of Research in Marketing: Special Issue on Consumer Identities, the values of their political affiliation are more important than the charity itself.

The word 'lunacy' is derived from the longheld belief that people act a little crazier during a full moon.  We know the moon - Luna - effects us, its gravitational pull creates ocean tides and many ancient cultures thought it could also affect our health or state of mind. While there is no link between the moon and human lunacy, spacecraft and computer simulations reveal that the moon does indeed have the cosmic kind; a far-reaching, invisible influence on the solar wind.

Oppressed people under attack in the War Against Smokers may have a new defender - science.