News Articles

Bacteria that generate significant amounts of electricity could be used in microbial fuel cells to provide power in remote environments or to convert waste to electricity.

Professor Derek Lovley from the University of Massachusetts isolated bacteria with large numbers of tiny projections called pili which were more efficient at transferring electrons to generate power in fuel cells than bacteria with a smooth surface.

The team's findings were reported at the Society for General Microbiology's meeting at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. “Putting Microbes to Work” is the Society for General Microbiology’s autumn conference at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh on 7 - 10 September 2009.

Researchers say they have identified a genetic variation in people with type 2 diabetes that affects how the body's muscle cells respond to the hormone insulin. Previous studies have identified several genetic variations in people with type 2 diabetes that affect how insulin is produced in the pancreas. Today's study shows for the first time a genetic variation that seems to impair the ability of the body's muscle cells to use insulin to help them make energy.

For most of the last century archaeologists, anthropologists, linguists and even geneticists have argued about who the ancestors of Europeans living today were.People lived in Europe before and after the last big ice age and managed to survive by hunting and gathering and farming spread into Europe from the Near East over the last 9,000 years, which boosted the amount of food that could be produced by as much as 100-fold. But the extent to which modern Europeans are descended from either of those two groups has eluded scientists.

ESA's XMM-Newton orbiting X-ray telescope has uncovered the first close-up of a white dwarf star, circling a companion star, that could explode into a particular kind of supernova.Well, in a few million years.Astronomers use these supernovae as beacons to measure cosmic distances and could one day help us understand the expansion of the Universe.   They've been on the trail of this particular mystery object since 1997 when they discovered that something was giving off X-rays near the bright star HD49798. Now the mysterious object has been tracked along its orbit and observation has shown it to be a white dwarf, the dead heart of a star, shining X-rays into space.   

Stanford scientists say they will reinvent digital photography with the introduction of an 'open-source' digital camera.If the technology catches on, camera performance will be no longer be limited by the software that comes pre-installed by the manufacturer because virtually all of the features of the Stanford camera – focus, exposure, shutter speed, flash, etc – are at the command of software that can be created by inspired programmers anywhere. "The premise of the project is to build a camera that is open source," said computer science professor Marc Levoy.

Should early 20th century researcher Paul Kammerer be credited as the founder of epigenetics?   It would certainly be a dramatic change from current perceptions of his work.Kammerer, a leading proponent of the Lamarckian theory of evolution, achieved global prominence in the 1920's by arguing that acquired traits could be passed down through generations and, in his most controversial experiment,  forced land dweller midwife toads to live in water. Their offspring preferred to live and mate in water and by the third generation he noted that they began to develop black nuptial pads on their forelimbs, a feature common to water dwelling species.

A new image of nearby galaxy NGC 4945 shows that it looks a lot like our own Milky Way. NGC 4945 seems to be a spiral galaxy with swirling, luminous arms and a bar-shaped central region, though NGC 4945 has a brighter center that likely harbors a supermassive black hole which is devouring reams of matter and blasting energy out into space.

One component of interstellar clouds emitting unusual infrared light known as the Unidentified Infrared Bands (UIRs) is a gaseous version of naphthalene, the chief component of mothballs back on Earth, according to research led by Michael Duncan, Regents Professor of Chemistry at the University of Georgia, along with doctoral student Allen Ricks and Gary Douberly, now an assistant professor in the department of chemistry at UGA. The UIRs have been seen by astronomers for more than 30 years, but no one has ever identified what specific molecules cause these patterns. 

The Eastern Seaboard had higher than normal sea levels in June and July and a new NOAA technical report blames persistent winds and a weakened current in the Mid-Atlantic . After observing water levels six inches to two feet higher than originally predicted, NOAA scientists began analyzing data from select tide stations and buoys from Maine to Florida and found that a weakening of the Florida Current Transport—an oceanic current that feeds into the Gulf Stream—in addition to steady and persistent Northeast winds, contributed to this anomaly.

There were a number of reasons carbon dioxide got singled out as a primary contributor to global warming and a key one was that it was the easiest problem to fix in Europe - more nuclear power and closing Soviet-era factories made goals achievable.  The US had no quick fix, since environmentalists dislike nuclear power in America, and with world leader China exempt from emissions caps, the effort to curb CO2 basically stalled.

A giant galaxy, so distant that it is seen as it was 12.8 billion years ago, is as large as the Milky Way and contains a supermassive black hole with at least a billion times as much matter as our Sun.The discovery, in a paper in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society by University of Hawaii astronomer Dr. Tomotsugu Goto and colleagues, lays claim to the most distant supermassive black hole ever found.

Researchers at the University of Warwick have found what could be the signal of ideal wave 'surfing' conditions for individual particles within the massive turbulent ocean of the solar wind, a discovery that could give a new insight into just how energy is dissipated in solar system sized plasmas such as the solar wind and could provide significant clues to scientists developing fusion power which relies on plasmas.The research, led by Khurom Kiyanai and Professor Sandra Chapman in the University of Warwick’s Centre for Fusion, Space and Astrophysics, looked at data from the Cluster spacecraft quartet to obtain a comparatively “quiet” slice of the solar wind as it progressed over an hour travelling covering roughly 2,340,000 Kilometers.