News Articles

A new small satellite about the size of a loaf of bread and called Firefly is designed to help solve the mystery of the most powerful natural particle accelerator in Earth's atmosphere - TGFs, or terrestrial gamma-ray flashes - which likely result from thunderstorms.The mission is the second project under the NSF CubeSat program. A CubeSat satellite consists of three cubes attached end to end in a rectangular shape.

Two of our galaxy's most massive stars, until recently shrouded in mystery, have been viewed by the Hubble Space Telescope, unveiling greater detail than ever before. The image shows a pair of colossal stars, WR 25 and Tr16-244, located within the open cluster Trumpler 16. This cluster is embedded within the Carina Nebula, an immense cauldron of gas and dust that lies approximately 7500 light-years from Earth. The Carina Nebula contains several ultra-hot stars, including these two star systems and the famous blue star Eta Carinae, which has the highest luminosity yet confirmed.  

A new "barcode chip" developed by researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) promises to revolutionize diagnostic medical testing. In less than 10 minutes, and using just a pinprick's worth of blood, the chip can measure the concentrations of dozens of proteins, including those that herald the presence of diseases like cancer and heart disease. The device, known as the Integrated Blood-Barcode Chip, or IBBC, was developed by a group of Caltech researchers led by James R. Heath, the Elizabeth W. Gilloon Professor and professor of chemistry, along with postdoctoral scholar Rong Fan and graduate student Ophir Vermesh, and by Leroy Hood, president of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, Washington. 

The Milagro collaboration, comprised of scientists from 16 institutions across the United States, has discovered two nearby regions with an unexpected excess of cosmic rays.   This is the second finding of a source of galactic cosmic rays relatively near Earth announced in the past week. In the November 20 issue of Nature, ATIC an international experiment led by LSU scientists announced finding an unexpected surplus of cosmic-ray electrons from an unidentified but relatively close source.

The global economic turmoil has started having an impact on the wind energy industry in Europe. Some companies are cutting down forecasts and production for 2009 and the market is showing the first signs of slowdown.
The current economic situation is slowly affecting the wind energy industry, remarks Frost Sullivan Research Analyst Gouri Nambudripad. "We are going to see a slowing down of the double-digit growth rates that were witnessed in the past few years.

Researchers at The Scripps Research Institute writing in Nature Structural&Molecular Biology say they have figured out how a macromolecular machine is able to unwind the long and twisted tangles of DNA within a cell's nucleus so that genetic information can be "read" and used to direct the synthesis of proteins, which have many specific functions in the body.

You've heard it before.   According to the laws of physics, bees can't fly.   Yet fly they do.   And British zoologist Sir James Gray noticed something strange about dolphins in 1936.  He had observed the sea mammals swimming at a swift rate of more than 20 miles per hour, but his studies had concluded that the muscles of dolphins simply weren't strong enough to support those kinds of speeds. The conundrum came to be known as "Gray's Paradox." For decades the puzzle prompted much attention, speculation, and conjecture in the scientific community. But now, armed with cutting-edge flow measurement technology, researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have tackled the problem and conclusively solved Gray's Paradox. 

A new species of bacterium that causes leprosy has been identified through intensive genetic analysis of a pair of lethal infections, a research team reports in the December issue of the American Journal of Clinical Pathology.All cases of leprosy, an ancient disease that still maims and kills in the developing world, previously had been thought to be caused by a single species of bacterium, said lead author Xiang-Yang Han, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor in Laboratory Medicine at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. 

New ways of squeezing out greater efficiency from solar photovoltaic cells are emerging from computer simulations and lab tests conducted by a team of physicists and engineers at MIT.This project, along with other research work going on now in solar cells, has the potential to get costs down "so that it becomes competitive with grid electricity," said Peter Bermel, a postdoctoral researcher in MIT's physics department who has been working on the project. While no single project is likely to achieve that goal, he said, this work is "the kind of science that needs to be explored in order to achieve that."

A study published in Journal of the American Water Resources Association states that the "Green Great Wall," a forest shelterbelt project in northern China running nearly parallel to the Great Wall, is likely to improve climatic and hydrological conditions in the area when completed. The project, which relies on afforestation (a process that changes land without dense tree cover into forest), could lead to an increase in precipitation by up to 20 percent and decrease the temperature in the area.

A new frog species has been discovered in Panama and will be announced in the December issue of Journal of Herpetology by a research team led by STRI former visiting scientist Joseph Mendelson, from Zoo Atlanta.The amphibian, a type of tree frog with bright reddish- and green-colored skin that grows to a length of 122 mm was discovered by Edgardo Griffith while working with Mendelson in El Valle. Mendelson was head of the Amphibian Recovery Project in 2005 under the STRI umbrella. Today, Griffith is the director of the El Níspero zoo's Amphibian Conservation Center in the Valle de Anton, working with the Houston Zoo.

A study of people living with the devastating effects of multiple sclerosis (MS) has provided an idea of the economic cost of living with the incurable, life-long condition.   The independent research is one of the largest ever studies into the financial impact of MS and has revealed that the cost of being diagnosed with MS is on average nearly GBP17,000 per person.