News Articles

Because global warming - whoops, climate change - became a political football rather than a scientific one, there are a lot of people attacking methodology and motive.   1990 does seem like a pretty arbitrary date for CO2 emissions until you realize that's right after the merger of Germany and all they, a key advocate of proponent, had to do to meet their target was close some World War 2 era Soviet factors in East Germany to meet their target.  And France just had to open up some more nuclear power plants (no CO2, but do American environmentalists think that is better?).

Where does space begin? Scientists at the University of Calgary have created a new instrument that is able to track the transition between the relatively gentle winds of Earth's atmosphere and the more violent flows of charged particles in space – flows that can reach speeds well over 1000 km/hr. And they have accomplished this in unprecedented detail. Data received from the U of C-designed instrument sent to space on a NASA launch from Alaska about two years ago was able to help pinpoint the so-called edge of space: the boundary between the Earth's atmosphere and outer space.With that data, U of C scientists confirmed that space begins 118 km above Earth.

Researchers from the Hotchkiss Brain Institute (HBI) in the Faculty of Medicine at University of Calgary have uncovered the first evidence that neurons talk to ‘glial’ cells in the digestive tract: a discovery that could help find a way to regulate and restore balance in the gut for the one in 10 Canadians suffering from irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and the more than 200,000 Canadians suffering from inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). 

Scorpions possess resistance to high temperatures and the ability to conserve water for long periods of time, and as a result thrive in hot and arid parts of the world. But is this global distribution also seen at a more local level?   Doctoral student Shmuel Raz and colleagues at the University of Haifa, Israel show that this is indeed the case, even when European-like and African-like habitats were separated by no more than 100 meters. Shmuel Raz and colleagues studied the communities of scorpions in a valley near Mount Carmel in Israel which has been dubbed "Evolution Canyon." Evolution Canyon" has steep slopes and runs approximately east-west, which means that the south-facing slope receive up to eight times as much solar radiation as the north-facing slope .

Soy aglycons of isoflavone (SAI), a group of soybean constituent chemicals, have been shown to promote health in a rat model of the menopause. The research in  Nutrition&Metabolism shows how dietary supplementation with SAI lowers cholesterol, increases the anti-oxidative properties of the liver and prevents degeneration of the vaginal lining.

Spoonjack today announced iBone -- the Pocket Trombone for iPhone and iPod Touch. iBone lets users play along with music in their iTunes library and with songs from the iBone Songbook and even shows them how. iBone combines an instrument, band, and trainer into a single application.
"Our aim is to produce something playable, practicable, and fun," said Tom Scharfeld, Founder of Spoonjack. "With iBone, we've brought the Bone and the band to the phone so users can make music, have fun, and even learn wherever they may be."
iBone features an interface easy enough for anyone to use: 1. Touch the display or blow into the microphone to produce a sound. 2. Slide fingers to change pitch. 3.

Complex objects like automobiles and birthday cakes are created using a 'top down' process; the structure is imposed from the outside.    When things grow using order imposed from within, like biological objects, it is called a bottom-up approach.    The construction of complex man-made objects--a car, for example, or even a pizza--almost invariably entails what are known as "top-down" processes, in which the structure and order of the thing being built is imposed from the outside (say, by an automobile assembly line, or the hands of the pizza maker).

Engineers at Oregon State University say they have discovered a way to use ancient life forms, diatoms, to create one of the newest technologies for solar energy - systems that may be surprisingly simple to build compared to existing silicon-based solar cells. Diatoms are tiny, single-celled marine life forms have existed for at least 100 million years and are the basis for much of the life in the oceans, but they also have rigid shells that can be used to create order in a natural way at the extraordinarily small level of nanotechnology.   They are also a key part of the marine food chain and help cycle carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. 

Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated a new ion trap that enables ions to go through an intersection while keeping their cool. Ten million times cooler than in prior similar trips, in fact.The demonstration described in Physical Review Letters is a step toward scaling up trap technology to build a large-scale quantum computer using ions (electrically charged atoms), a potentially powerful machine that could perform certain calculations—such as breaking today’s best data encryption codes—much faster than today’s computers.

The great thing about science is that we will converge on the correct answer eventually.  In something like climate change, there is rarely one correct answer and while greenhouse gases have long been center stage in discussions about global climate change, new NASA research suggests that much of the atmospheric warming observed in the Arctic since 1976 may be due to changes in tiny airborne particles called aerosols.
That doesn't mean mankind is off the hook.   Aerosols are emitted by both natural and human sources and, regardless of where they come from, they can directly influence climate by reflecting or absorbing the sun's radiation. The small particles also affect climate indirectly by seeding clouds and changing cloud properties, such as reflectivity.

Researchers at the Joslin Diabetes Center have demonstrated that adult humans still have a type of "good" fat previously believed to be present only in babies and children. Unlike white fat, which stores energy and comprises most body fat, this good fat, called brown fat, is active in burning calories and using energy. The finding reported in The New England Journal of Medicine could pave the way for new treatments both for obesity and type 2 diabetes. Scientists had thought that brown fat only existed in humans during childhood and was mostly gone by adulthood. The paper shows that brown fat not only exists in adult humans, but also for the first time, that the fat is metabolically active.

Researchers at the University of Arkansas have shown that changing the chirality, or direction of spin, of a nanoscale magnetic vortex creates an electric pulse, suggesting that such a pulse might be of use in creating computer memory and writing information. Physicists Sergey Prosandeev and Laurent Bellaiche reported their findings in Physical Review Letters.“This is new physics,” Prosandeev said. “There are many possibilities that can follow from this.”