News Articles

Official professional standards in both Scotland and England which aim to nurture the development of new teachers pay too little attention to what 'becoming' a teacher is really like, according to new research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) which finds that existing standards ignore the emotional, relationship and personal issues which are the real challenge for teachers starting out in their careers, focussing instead on the acquisition of skills and knowledge. Resulting from the study, researchers propose a new model which aims to improve existing standards by capturing the multi-dimensional experience of new teachers.Professor of Teacher Education at the University of Strathclyde, Jim McNally, says: "Existing competence-based professional standar

Multiple high-definition videos and other data-rich services may soon stream through homes, offices, ships and planes via new hybrid optical/ultra-wideband-radio systems developed by European researchers.Moshe Ran, Coordinator of the EU-funded project, UROOF (Photonic components for Ultra-wideband Radio Over Optical Fiber), has a vision. He wants to see streams of high-definition video and other high-bandwidth services flowing through homes, office buildings, and even ships and planes, through a happy marriage of optical and ultra-wideband radio technologies.“It’s a natural combination that can bring a lot of advantages to the world,” says Ran.

A Spanish research study has tested different combinations of supports and indigenous plants to determine which are the best for reducing energy consumption inside buildings. This type of roof is a “rurban”, sustainable architectural solution that will lead to a reduction in environmental and acoustic contamination levels in cities, and be visually pleasing.Researchers from the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM) have built a roof covered with plants and a watering system that will optimise the consumption of a building’s heating and cooling systems thanks to its insulation. It is a third-generation ecological roof, characterized by its sustainability and the use of indigenous plant species.

A team of investigators from Valencia has developed a machine that separates automatically the seeds from the rind and pith of the pomegranate. The mechanism uses a computer vision system to distinguish and sort the different parts of this fruit, according to a study published on-line by the Journal of Food Engineering.The difficulty in peeling pomegranates and separating out the seeds disheartens many consumers when they eat the fruit of the pomegranate (Punica granatum). Now this Spanish invention enables the food to be de-seeded automatically.

Breast cancer, the leading cause of death among women in France, is the most commonly occurring cancer in women. Sporadic breast cancer, which is non-hereditary, turns out to be the most widespread, representing 85 to 90% of all cases, but remains the least well-known. Researchers at CNRS and CEA (1), working with a team from Hôpital Saint-Louis (2), have just discovered the cause of 50% of sporadic breast cancers. The results should also explain epidemiological studies which suggest that hormone treatment predisposes patients to breast cancer. The work is published in Cancer Research.

Women who are exposed to hairspray in the workplace during pregnancy have more than double the risk of having a son with the genital birth defect hypospadias, according to a new study published today in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives. The study is the first to show a significant link between hairspray and hypospadias, one of the most common birth defects of the male genitalia, where the urinary opening is displaced to the underside of the penis. The causes of the condition are poorly understood.

Beta Pictoris is one of the best-known examples of stars surrounded by a dusty 'debris' disc.  Only 12 million years old, the 'baby star' Beta Pictoris is located about 70 light-years away towards the constellation Pictor (the Painter).Debris discs are composed of dust resulting from collisions among larger bodies like planetary embryos or asteroids. They are a bigger version of the zodiacal dust in our Solar System.

When a flow reaches a certain speed, things get turbulent: The fluid or the gas no longer flows in an orderly fashion but whirls around wildly.  Turbulent flows in pipes are of importance for many every-day applications. What they all have in common is their appearance: They travel down the pipe bubbling and gurgling like a mountain stream. The flow only calms down when its speed is reduced. Scientists call this calmer state laminar. Crucial for the difference between laminar and turbulent flow are the inner forces that link the water molecule to each other. Only if the influence of these inner forces is smaller than the influence of the forces that accelerate the flow can turbulence appear.

Slow-moving ocean and river currents could be a new, reliable and affordable alternative energy source. A University of Michigan engineer has made a machine that works like a fish to turn potentially destructive vibrations in fluid flows into clean, renewable power.The machine is called VIVACE. A paper on it is published in the current issue of the quarterly Journal of Offshore Mechanics and Arctic Engineering.VIVACE is the first known device that could harness energy from most of the water currents around the globe because it works in flows moving slower than 2 knots (about 2 miles per hour.) Most of the Earth's currents are slower than 3 knots. Turbines and water mills need an average of 5 or 6 knots to operate efficiently.

Cordiality and mutually beneficial arrangements can be more important than hard-negotiated deals when it comes to cementing strong working relationships among supply chain partners, according to the Management Insights feature in the current issue of Management Science. In their study, the authors observe that people's actions in economic transactions are motivated by more than incentives. Incentives, say the authors, can cause people to be calculating rather than oriented toward a win-win. Behavior is also influenced emotionally by social preferences. In particular, people care about status ("how much do I have relative to you?") and reciprocity ("if you were nice to me, I want to reciprocate; if you were not nice, I want to retaliate"). 

It is said that timing is everything, and that certainly appears to be true for autumn infants. Children who are born four months before the height of cold and flu season have a greater risk of developing childhood asthma than children born at any other time of year, according to new research. The study analyzed the birth and medical records of more than 95,000 children and their mothers in Tennessee to determine whether date of birth in relationship to the peak in winter respiratory viruses posed a higher risk for developing early childhood asthma. They found that while having clinically significant bronchiolitis at any age during infancy was associated with an increased risk of childhood asthma, for autumn babies, that risk was the greatest. 

Scientists writing in PLoS Pathogens have reported the discovery of a new species of Ebola virus, provisionally named Bundibugyo ebolavirus. The virus, which was responsible for a hemorrhagic fever outbreak in western Uganda in 2007, has been characterized by a team of researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia the Uganda Virus Research Institute; the Uganda Ministry of Health; and Columbia University.