News Articles

Americans go to church less but the rate of departure previously reported may have been incorrect, according to sociologists Michael Hout and Claude S. Fischer of the University of California, Berkeley.According to the new data, 93 percent of Americans believe in God, a figure unchanged since 1988. The group that increased was the group Hout and Fischer call "unchurched believers," those people who believe in God but report no religion. 

A new paper outlines what it calls a simple-to-use technique which enables companies to optimize the performance of industrial boilers and reduce their main emissions.It's about time.   Obviously there aren't going to be any new super-efficient combustion techniques any time soon -   combustion is what it is - but using a new oxidation method with an improved catalyst is a different story.   A catalyst is a substance which increases the speed of chemical reactions, without taking any apparent part in the reaction, or which modifies the parameters of the reaction (temperature, pressure, concentration, etc.).  In the case of catalytic combustion, the main parameter is its speed of reaction given by the equation for the speed of the flame front UL:

When it comes to how they raise their children, mothers do things the way their mothers did, according to a new study that looked at parenting practices across two generations.Fathers don't seem to use their moms as parenting role models despite the fact that the fathers studied were raised more by their mothers, even in a changing workplace environment.Obviously, fathers may have been more influenced by their dads rather than their moms, but the surveys used by the study didn't examine their fathers' behavior,  said Jonathan Vespa, co-author of the study and doctoral student in sociology at Ohio State.

The hunt for dark energy is on and ways to find it, such as weak gravitational lensing and baryon acoustic oscillation, hold great promise but are as yet unproven.   Supernovae studies, which depend on measuring the redshift and brightness of distant Type Ia supernovae, are the most reliable.

Cats have a reputation for being smart but dogs deserve more respect, says canine researcher Stanley Coren, PhD, of the University of British Columbia, who spoke on dog psychology (seriously) today on the topic “How Dogs Think” at the American Psychological Association’s 117th Annual Convention.They can also understand more than 150 words and intentionally deceive other dogs and people to get treats,  Coren says. He is the author of more than a half-dozen popular books on dogs and dog behavior, and reviewed numerous studies to conclude that dogs have the ability to solve complex problems and are more like humans and other higher primates than previously thought. 

A study of college students found that the more time they spent on Facebook, the more likely they or their squeeze got jealous about the information posted there, leading to more time spent on Facebook and further fueling jealousy.Facebook could tank your relationship, says the study in CyberPsychology&Behavior, though obviously Facebook (not to exclude Twitter,  though 140 characters is too short to say anything meaningful) is a catalyst and not the source of the problem.

If there's one thing you've heard over and over, it's that mean old religion has always been the enemy of science.  It isn't true, of course, but at least in America, with its Protestant heritage, anything that slammed Catholics got traction and, among atheists, anything that slammed religion was believed without skepticism.A new book by James Hannam called "God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science" seeks to gain some respect for medieval scientists and, if religion gets sucked along in the jet wash, that's okay too.

Harboring astonishing genomic variability, human brain cells prefer to have not one, but many DNA scripts. A team, led by Fred Gage, Ph.D., a professor in the Salk's Laboratory of Genetics, found that human brain cells contain an unexpected number of so-called mobile elements. These extraordinary pieces of DNA insert extra copies of themselves throughout the genome using a "copy and paste" mechanism. The findings, to be published in Nature, could help explain brain development and individuality.

Geckos have the uncanny ability to traverse even the trickiest terrain without so much as a slip. Until now, it has been unknown when and how they switch on their they all-foot grip. Scientists at the University of Calgary and Clemson University in South Carolina have discovered that the geckos' amazing grip is triggered by gravity. "Geckos use microscopic, hair-like filaments to attach to surfaces. Only at certain angles do they switch on their traction system, however," says Russell, a biological sciences professor at the U of C. "We are trying to understand this process, which will help in mimicking it for application to robotics."

When the ancient Japanese art of origami first came about, it consisted of one piece of paper folded to form cranes, flowers, and other shapes. Now, however origami has been revised and resized a bit. All the way down to the nanometer (1/1000000000 meters). Scientists at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) and Harvard University have have taken a new approach to building nanoscale structures out of DNA with its complex twisting and curving shapes. In the journal Science, they report a series of experiments in which they folded DNA, "origami-style," into three dimensional objects including a beachball-shaped wireframe capsule just 50 nanometers in diameter.

It doesn't take a catastrophe to end entire lineages. (Well, for the dinosaurs it did.) But an analysis of 200 million years of history for marine clams found that vulnerability to extinction runs in evolutionary families, even when the losses result form ongoing, background rates of extinction.

A new process that cleans wastewater, generates electricity, and can remove 90 percent of salt from brackish water or seawater, was reported by an international team of researchers from China and the U.S. Clean water for drinking, washing, and industrial uses is a scarce resource in some parts of the world. Its availability in the future will be even more problematic. Many locations already desalinate water using either a reverse osmosis process -- one that pushes water under high pressure through membranes that allow water to pass but not salt -- or an electrodialysis process that uses electricity to draw salt ions out of water through a membrane. Both methods require large amounts of energy.