News Articles

Billions of stars in our galaxy have acquired released planets that once roamed interstellar space. Those free agent worlds left the star systems in which they formed, and found a new home with a different sun. If it sounds a lot like baseball, that's because it is, said Hagai Perets of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, making the most incongruent cosmological metaphor of April 17th, 2012.

A small marine worm, Olavius algarvensis, is faced with a scarce food supply in the sandy sediments it lives in off the coast of Elba, so it must deal with a highly poisonous menu: it lives on carbon monoxide and hydrogen sulfide.O. algarvensis can thrive on these poisons thanks to millions of symbiotic bacteria that live under its skin. The bacteria use the energy from carbon monoxide and hydrogen sulphide to produce food for the worm, just like plants do by fixing carbon dioxide into carbohydrates - but instead of using light energy from the sun, the symbionts use the energy from chemical compounds like carbon monoxide.

Dye-sensitized solar cells (DSC) are easier to manufacture than silicon-based solid-state photovoltaic cells but not as efficient. Some new research may make carbon nanotubes a more efficient alternative for platinum electrodes in dye-sensitized solar cells, making them more viable overall.

Wikipedia is crowdsourced knowledge and therefore discourages people from writing about themselves. As a result, 60 percent of Wikipedia articles about companies contain factual errors, according to research published in Public Relations Journal.Marcia W. DiStaso, Ph.D., assistant professor of public relations at Penn State University, surveyed 1,284 public relations people from the Public Relations Society of America's (PRSA). Results of the survey indicate a gap exists between public relations companies and Wikipedia concerning the proper protocol for editing entries.

Whether you are concerned about Mayans, a worldwide infrastructure collapse or an exploding supervolcano, science has some good news for your doomsday preparation - sunlight and a twist of lime are an inexpensive and effective way to quickly improve the quality of your drinking water.Researchers have found that adding lime juice to water while using a solar disinfection method removed detectable levels of harmful bacteria such as Escherichia coli (E. coli) significantly faster than solar disinfection alone. 

Proteins are large, organic - in the science sense of organic, not the food marketing sense -  molecules that help us to convert food into energy, supply oxygen to our blood and muscles and drive our immune systems. Proteins consist of one or more polypeptides, chains of amino acids held together by peptide bonds. If a protein in water is heated to temperatures approaching the boiling point of water, these chains will lose their structure and the protein will denature (unfold). 

We created clocks and calendars to give people a common way to communicate about the future and the past and about when to have dinner.  But time is, as they say, relative.  A clock on top of a mountain moves differently than one at sea level - that's gravitational time dilation. NIST researchers have even been able to show that tall people age differently than short ones. And if you lived your life in a car traveling 20 miles per hour, you would age slower than people who just walk around. Time is not only relative in physics, it is relative in culture.  We feel like time moves faster the older we get.

People with Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD) have an obsession relating to their body image, where they believe that they have a defect in their appearance.BDD is estimated to affect one to two per cent of the population. Individuals with BDD engage with time-consuming compulsive behaviors such as mirror-checking, applying make-up to camouflage and seeking reassurance about their appearance.

Noise levels, fine particulate matter that leads to smog and traffic volumes are a big concern to  urban planners and residents now but they will be even bigger issues in the 'city of tomorrow'. Three-dimensional tools will soon make it easier to simulate those issues: as the user virtually moves through his city, the corresponding data are displayed as green, yellow or red dots.

A new study estimates that more than 260,000 dogs and cats were sent to UK rescue shelters in 2009, the first full year of the worldwide recession.Dogs and cats are popular pets in the UK and two of the authors of the new estimate study, Dr. Jane Murray and Professor Tim Gruffydd-Jones, having previously estimated the owned cat and dog populations at approximately 10.3 and 10.5 million respectively. 

Astronomers believe they have found the answer to the mystery of a powerful ‘superwind’ which causes the death of stars.Stars like our own Sun end their lives with a ‘superwind’ 100 million times stronger than the solar wind, which occurs over a period of 10,000 years, and removes as much as half the mass of the star. At the end, only a dying and fading remnant of the star remain. Not to worry. The Sun won't begin to throw out those gases for around five billion years.

100 years yesterday, the RMS Titanic struck an iceberg while crossing the North Atlantic and sank, killing over 1500 passengers and crew.