News Articles

As the United Nations climate negotiations proceed in Bali, Indonesia, researchers have taken a first step toward quantifying the "socioclimatic" exposure of different countries to future climate change.
The research team from Purdue University and the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, found that China, India and the United States - major greenhouse gas-emitting nations that are currently unbound by the Kyoto treaty - face substantial exposure relative to other nations, but that every area of the world faces high exposure in at least one category.

This image illustrates the projected relative exposure for each country given expected 21st century climate change and

When a female is attracted to a male, entire suites of genes in her brain turn on and off, show biologists from The University of Texas at Austin studying swordtail fish.
Molly Cummings and Hans Hofmann found that some genes were turned on when females found a male attractive, but a larger number of genes were turned off.
“When females were most excited—when attractive males were around—we observed the greatest down regulation [turning off] of genes,” said Cummings, assistant professor of integrative biology. “It’s possible that this could lead to a release of inhibition, a transition to being receptive to mating.”

A new genus and species of dinosaur from the Early Jurassic has been discovered in Antarctica. The massive plant-eating primitive sauropodomorph is called Glacialisaurus hammeri and lived about 190 million years ago.
The recently published description of the new dinosaur is based on partial foot, leg and ankle bones found on Mt. Kirkpatrick near the Beardmore Glacier in Antarctica at an elevation of more than 13,000 feet.
“The fossils were painstakingly removed from the ice and rock using jackhammers, rock saws and chisels under extremely difficult conditions over the course of two field seasons,” said Nathan Smith, a graduate student at The Field Museum.

A collaboration of over 50 astronomers, The IPHAS consortium, led from the UK, with partners in Europe, USA, Australia, has released today (10th December 2007) the first comprehensive optical digital survey of our own Milky Way. Conducted by looking at light emitted by hydrogen ions, using the Isaac Newton Telescope on La Palma, the survey contains stunning red images of nebulae and stars. The data is described in a paper submitted to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
To date, the IPHAS survey includes some 200 million unique objects in the newly released catalogue. This immense resource will foster studies that can be at once both comprehensive and subtle, of the stellar demographics of the Milky Way and of its three-dimensional structure.

Vanessa Hull, 25, a Ph.D. candidate at Michigan State University, is in the snowy, remote mountains of the Sichuan Province of China--the heart of panda habitat. She's hoping to capture, collar and track up to four wild pandas using advanced global positioning systems.
Along with her research gear, Hull, a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Fellow and MSU University Distinguished Fellow, is lugging a small digital video camera and a laptop computer.

NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft has entered a vast region at the edge of our solar system where the solar wind runs up against the thin gas between the stars, called the heliosheath, and what it found is surprising - our solar system is 'dented.'
Voyager 2 entered the heliosheath on August 30, 2007, crossing the heliosheath boundary, called the solar wind termination shock, about 10 billion miles away from Voyager 1 and almost a billion miles closer to the sun, and confirmed that our solar system is “squashed” – that the bubble carved into interstellar space by the solar wind is not perfectly round.

Two researchers have found that the effects of the current warming and melting of Greenland 's glaciers that has alarmed the world's climate scientists occurred in the decades following an abrupt warming in the 1920s.
Their evidence reinforces the belief that glaciers and other bodies of ice are exquisitely hyper-sensitive to climate chang.
Using weather station records from the past century, they recently recognized that temperatures in Greenland had warmed in the 1920s at rates equivalent to the recent past. But they hadn't confirmed that the island's glaciers responded to that earlier warming until now.

1850-2004.

Microbes could provide a clean, renewable energy source and use up carbon dioxide in the process, suggested Dr James Chong at a Science Media Centre press briefing today.
“Methanogens are microbes called archaea that are similar to bacteria. They are responsible for the vast majority of methane produced on earth by living things” says Dr Chong from York University. “They use carbon dioxide to make methane, the major flammable component of natural gas. So methanogens could be used to make a renewable, carbon neutral gas substitute.”

Crohn’s is a condition that affects one in 800 people in the UK and causes chronic intestinal inflammation, leading to pain, bleeding and diarrhoea.
The team found that a bacterium called Mycobacterium paratuberculosis releases a molecule that prevents a type of white blood cell from killing E.coli bacteria found in the body. E.coli is known to be present within Crohn’s disease tissue in increased numbers.
It is thought that the Mycobacteria make their way into the body’s system via cows’ milk and other dairy products. In cattle it can cause an illness called Johne's disease - a wasting, diarrhoeal condition. Until now, however, it has been unclear how this bacterium could trigger intestinal inflammation in humans.

Researchers discovered genetic evidence that human evolution is speeding up – and has not halted or proceeded at a constant rate, as had been thought – indicating that humans on different continents are becoming increasingly different.
“We used a new genomic technology to show that humans are evolving rapidly, and that the pace of change has accelerated a lot in the last 40,000 years, especially since the end of the Ice Age roughly 10,000 years ago,” says research team leader Henry Harpending, a distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of Utah.
Harpending says there are provocative implications from the study, published Dec. 10 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:

LONDON, December 10 /PRNewswire/ --
- New research announced this week has found an association between certain genes and the severity of multiple sclerosis (MS).
The results of the study by Prof George Ebers, Chair of Clinical Neurology at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, will be published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and represent a step forward in the understanding of the role of genetics in MS.
The study involved comparing genes from people with severe MS who used wheelchairs within five years of being diagnosed and people who had no disability 20 years after diagnosis.

Imagine you are sitting around a campfire. If you move closer to the fire you get hotter. If you move awayy ou get cooler. Pretty basic, right?
Our closest star, the sun, doesn't follow those rules. As you move away from the solar surface, into the sun's outer atmosphere (the corona) it actually gets a lot hotter before it cools off. The solar surface is about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, while temperatures in the corona soar to millions of degrees.
Although scientists have some ideas of what might heat the solar corona, there is no universally accepted explanation.