News Articles

New research on Jakobshavn Isbrae, a tongue of ice extending out to sea from Greenland's west coast, shows that large, marine-calving glaciers don't just shrink rapidly in response to global warming, they also grow at a remarkable pace during periods of global cooling.  Glaciers change.Through an analysis of adjacent lake sediments and plant fossils, the researchers determined that the glacier, which retreated about 40 kilometers inland between 1850 and 2010, expanded outward at a similar pace about 200 years ago, during a time of cooler temperatures known as the Little Ice Age.

Trees absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as they grow so forests are a completely natural way to offset climate change - but rather than let them passively sit there, the amount of carbon dioxide they extract from the atmosphere could be boosted by 400 percent if wood was harvested and used in smaller buildings instead of the steel and concrete that require a lot more fossil fuels during manufacturing, producing carbon dioxide.

WHITEHOUSE STATION, N.J., June 25, 2011

Have a computer?  Of course you do, or you aren't reading this article.   That, and a little space on your floor can make you a 'citizen seismologist.'The Quake Catcher Network is 6,000 tiny sensors, part of the densest networks of seismic sensors ever devoted to studying earthquakes, and it began rolling out in the San Francisco Bay Area where volunteer installers delivered 200 sensors to people who signed up to host them.

Students are often driven by baser concerns and robotics students even more so - hungry all of the time?  Invent a robot that can cook.   Need to take over the Republic?   Build some robots that, oddly, use colored swords.   The Experimental Robotics course at Stanford gives students a chance to show off their automated ideas to classmates in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.     The course is a chance for students to take the math and programming skills they learned in the Intro to Robotics course and use them to direct a pre-fabricated robotic arm to perform a task in the real world.

There were concerns among people who don't understand physics that the LHC might create a black hole and swallow the Earth.    Obviously in an infinite Universe anything can happen but the precautionary principle taken to such extremes is really only used by groups like anti-environment crusaders, pro-environment crusaders and also anti-vaccine people, etc.  In reality, the energy couldn't kill a fly (see Shut Down The LHC? I'd Rather Not Hurt A Fly).

Researchers are reporting the construction of what they term "artificial molecules" and say they can use the technology to engineer a new generation of nanomaterials that control and direct the energy absorbed from light.Including an antenna that can build itself.
Traditional antennas increase the amount of an electromagnetic wave – such as a radio frequency – that is absorbed, and then funnel that energy to a circuit. These nanoantennas instead increased the amount of light that is absorbed and funneled it to a single site within their molecule-like complexes. This concept is already used in nature in light harvesting antennas, constituents of leaves that make photosynthesis efficient.

A new finding may mean that nearly all leukemia and lymphoma patients in need of a transplant can find donors.Results of two clinical trials show transplant results with half-matched bone marrow or umbilical cord blood are comparable to fully matched tissue, thanks in large part to the availability of effective anti-rejection drugs and special post-transplant chemotherapy. Plans are under way for a four-year randomized trial for so-called haploidentical marrow or cord blood transplants in 380 patients to begin late this year or early next year. Many large medical centers, including Johns Hopkins, are expected to participate.

Sometimes a person who gets drunk can perform functions their friends might regard as ordinary, like carrying on a conversation or driving a car - but the drunkard might have no memory of those things and those periods of amnesia, commonly known as "blackouts", can last from a few minutes to several hours.

The image of a stoner always having the munchies is a stereotype because it's true - and it's true, say researchers, because it has a basis in biology.Daniele Piomelli, Nicholas DiPatrizio and colleagues found that fats in foods like potato chips and french fries trigger a biological mechanism - and that is driven by natural marijuana-like chemicals in the body called endocannabinoids.In their study, they discovered that when rats tasted something fatty, cells in their upper gut started producing endocannabinoids but sugars and proteins did not have this effect.

Long before "Star Wars", science-fiction had talked of robot walkers.  In "War of the Worlds", even aliens from Mars had giant, mechanized tripeds and they got killed by a few germs.  But the real world worked on them also.   Now on display at the US Army Transportation Musem at Fort Eustis is GE’s Pedipulator, or “Walking Truck", which was developed for the U.S. Army in the mid-‘60s.  This quadroped first lumbered through testing paces  Pittsfield, Massachusetts, circa 1962.

Growing human, perfectly matching organs inside a pig and then transplanting them into humans is not a new idea - it may revolutionize medicine - but a new discovery may also allow pig tissue to be transplanted directly into humans. The research in the Journal of Leukocyte Biology may lead to filling the short term lack of organs for human transplantation. Altering or overexpressing the human programmed death ligand-1 (PD-L1) molecule in the endothelial cells of pig arteries reduced the conditions that lead to rejection, it says. This strongly suggests that successful Xenotransplantation means humans could receive altered porcine organs with fewer complications.