News Articles

Polar science will continue to have a global impact, whether you believe in man-made climate change or not, says an expert.Global warming was always an unfortunate use of 'framing' by policy-oriented scientists who were out of their league and political groups looking to mobilize their base.   Climate change was always the issue and change can mean warming ... which leads to cooling.

Galaxy M51, now called the Whirlpool Galaxy, was discovered by Charles Messier in 1773 but its spiral structure was first found by William Parsons in 1845, using his huge (and wonderfully named) reflecting telescope called the Leviathan of Parsonstown.  Today even small amateur telescopes can see that this galaxy is not isolated, but has a small companion, a dwarf irregular galaxy NGC 5195.These two stellar systems are colliding and the spiral shape of M51 is due to the tidal forces unleashed during this process.    At a distance of 23 millions of light-years, the apparent dimensions of M51 mean that that galaxy has to be quite similar to our own, yet somewhat smaller.   

Each day the humans are confronted with a variety of pathogens. Most of them are fended off by our immune system. For a successful infection, bacteria must deliver so-called virulence factors through a transport channel located in the bacterial membrane.  Scientists from the Max Planck Society and the Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing have shown how in some bacteria this transport channel is formed like a syringe, enabling them to inject virulence factors directly into the host cell - an important starting point for the development of new drugs that might interfere considerably earlier than antibiotics in the course of infection. 

A new strain of bacteria  can produce non-toxic, comparatively inexpensive rhamnolipids and effectively help degrade polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs – the environmental pollutants that are one of the most harmful aspects of oil spills.The findings on this new bacterial strain, NY3, of a common bacteria that has been known of for decades, called Pseudomonas aeruginosa, that degrades the PAHs in oil and other hydrocarbons were just published in Biotechnology Advances by researchers from Oregon State University and two collaborating universities in China.   Because of some unique characteristics, this new bacterial strain could be of considerable value in the long-term cleanup of the massive Gulf Coast oil spill caused by BP.

The 2010 World Cup will be watched online by nearly a third of British football fans, according to a survey released today by PC World. They questioned over 3,000 Brits in the run up to the World Cup following a surge in sales of its wireless networking and video streaming gadgets.
What did they find?
 30% of fans, which equates to over 14 million of those expected to watch the World Cup live, are planning on doing so over the Internet.
Nearly a quarter (23%) revealed they would be using laptops or desktop PCs.

Players, most loudly in Brazil, are not happy with the Jabulani ball in use for World Cup 2010 and have made no secret about it recently - despite it being in use for months.    There hasn't been this much controversy over a World Cup ball since ... well ... the last World Cup, when the ball was called too smooth.So will things get even weirder since the 2010 ball has new ridges and grooves?    They sure will, say physics experts at the University of Adelaide who believe the new Jabulani ball will play "harder and faster", bending even more unpredictably than its predecessor.But why, and what will it mean for the World Cup?

No one says, "I am in favor of pollution" but how would anyone know who really cares?   Body language, claims a new book.Professor Geoff Beattie, from The University of Manchester, says mismatches between gestures and speech will allow us to identify ‘green fakers’, regardless of what they actually say.His research for the Sustainable Consumption Institute used video recordings to examine the gestures and speech of people with differing views on the environment while they talked about carbon labeling, global warming and their lifestyles.  By examining their gestures, each speaker showed a connection between what they were saying and what they actually believed, Beattie says.

How geeky do you have to be to attend a mathematical meeting every 4 years - and think India in August is a cool place to do it?   Pretty geeky.   The ultimate geeks.If that is you, we know where you will be August 2010, when the largest gathering of geeks ever will happen in Hyderabad.   It's the International Congress of Mathematicians, the biggest and most prestigious international mathematical meeting, which takes place once every four years. No meeting in any scientific discipline has the kind of wide sweep that ICMs have: every branch of mathematics is covered and emphasis is on the essential unity of all mathematics. 

Large amounts of money are being siphoned from the multi-billion dollar cigarette smuggling trade and going right into the pockets of terrorist networks and international organized crime. 
A United Nations Security Council investigative body, the Group of Experts, has reported that millions of dollars in illicit tobacco revenues are reaching al-Qaeda, the Taliban and other terrorist organizations, and is financing Congolese rebels for the recruitment of child soldiers, mass rape and murders.
 The World Health Organization's Framework Convention on Tobacco Control has determined that 600 billion counterfeited and smuggled cigarettes cross national borders annually. This represents $50 billion in lost proceeds affecting nations throughout the world.

Sexsomnia may be more common than previously believed and is more common in men than women, according to new research presented today at SLEEP 2010.   Their results indicate that 7.6 percent of patients (63 of 832) at a sleep disorders center reported that they had initiated or engaged in sexual activity with a bed partner while still asleep.The prevalence of reported sexsomnia was nearly three times higher in men (11 percent) than in women (four percent).

Are you a bold personality?  High self-esteem, action-oriented, eager, tenacious?  If so, you are more likely to be a religious extremist when anxiety occurs, according to findings by York University researchers in this month's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.In a series of studies, over 600 participants were placed in anxiety-provoking or neutral situations and then asked to describe their personal goals and rate their degree of conviction for their religious ideals. This included asking participants whether they would give their lives for their faith or support a war in its defense.

Using an implicit task, researchers monitored how people automatically responded to words – in this case, whether they find it easier to link words referring to their partner to words with pleasant or unpleasant meanings - and this told them how likely couples were to split up.Most research on relationship success has focused on how the people in the relationship feel about each other and  this is usually done by the obvious route - asking them.But people may not really know how happy they are, says Ronald D. Rogge, of the University of Rochester, and "to make things worse, a lot of people don't want to tell you if they're starting to feel less happy in their relationship."