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Rains are back, and we hardly remember how dry it was a couple of weeks ago. Usually, we do not associate moist tropical forests with drought, but during the ‘verano' it gets astonishingly dry in most Panamanian lowland forests, just as in many tropical forests worldwide: Plants suffer from drought, they grow slower, wilt and even die.

credit: STRI

Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated a novel way of making atoms interfere with each other, recreating a famous experiment originally done with light while also making the atoms do things that light just won't do.
Their experiments showcase some of the extraordinary behavior taken for granted in the quantum world—atoms acting like waves and appearing in two places at once, for starters—and demonstrate a new technique that could be useful in quantum computing with neutral atoms and further studies of atomic hijinks.

Atoms interfering with themselves.

Childhood obesity is widely recognised as a major contributor towards cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, sleep disorders, and psychological and social problems. The China National Nutrition and Health survey in 2002 revealed that the prevalence of overweight individuals has increased overall by 39% in the past ten years.
In Xi'an City, where the new study was conducted, 20% of the adolescents were found to be overweight, a rate similar to that observed in many western countries. In a recent report in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, researchers found the following factors were significantly associated with overweight and obesity in children included:

living in urban districts

Researchers at NIST, in collaboration with scientists from the University of Maryland and Howard University, have developed a technique to create tiny, highly efficient light-emitting diodes (LEDs) from nanowires. As described in a recent paper,* the fabricated LEDs emit ultraviolet light—a key wavelength range required for many light-based nanotechnologies, including data storage—and the assembly technique is well-suited for scaling to commercial production.

Micrograph of a complete nanowire LED with the end contact. The long nanowire (A) is about 110 micrometers long, a shorter nanowire (B) crosses it. The bright circular section is the metal post from which the nanowires are aligned.

Why are there no Unicorns?
Perhaps horses develop in a way that cannot be easily modified to produce a Unicorn, so such creatures have never arisen. Or maybe Unicorn-like animals have been born in the past but because there is no advantage for a horse to have a horn, such creatures did not thrive and were weeded out by natural selection.

In a fundamental discovery that someday may help cure type 1 diabetes by allowing people to grow their own insulin-producing cells for a damaged or defective pancreas, medical researchers here have reported that they have engineered adult stem cells derived from human umbilical cord blood to produce insulin.
Their paper cites six years of research and calls it "the first demonstration that human umbilical cord blood-derived stem cells can be engineered" to synthesize insulin.

On 12 May 2007 Cassini obtained this image showing the coastline and an archipelago in a portion of a large sea, consistent with the larger sea seen by the Cassini imaging instrument.
Like other liquid bodies seen on Titan, this feature reveals channels, islands, bays, and other features typical of terrestrial coastlines and the liquid, most likely a combination of methane and ethane, appears very dark in radar. What is striking about this portion of the sea compared to other liquid bodies on Titan is the relative absence of brighter regions within it, suggesting that the depth of the liquid here exceeds tens of metres.

Long before animals with limbs (tetrapods) came onto the scene about 365 million years ago, fish already possessed the genes associated with helping to grow hands and feet (autopods) report University of Chicago researchers.

Paddlefish fins exhibit a unique pattern of Hox expression previously thought present only in the developing hands and feet of land vertebrates (tetrapods). This result supports the notion that fossil fish already possessed the genetic toolkit needed to evolve hands, feet, fingers and toes. Credit: University of Chicago Medical Center

During the first 24 hours of invasion by the malaria-inducing parasite Plasmodium falciparum, red blood cells start to lose their ability to deform and squeeze through tiny blood vessels-one of the hallmarks of the deadly disease that infects nearly 400 million people each year. Now, an international team of researchers led by an MIT professor has demonstrated just why that happens.

People addicted to alcohol and young adults who are heavy drinkers, but not considered alcoholics, have something in common: they possess poor decision-making skills, according to psychologists at the University of Missouri-Columbia. The findings are based on research examining binge drinking and heavy alcohol use among college students.

The vast majority of chemotherapy errors identified in children reach patients, according to one of the first epidemiological studies of cancer drug errors in children. Published in the July 1, 2007 issue of CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society, the study concluded that the antimetabolite class of chemotherapeutic agents are most likely associated with errors, and that errors in drug administration and errors in drug dosing and frequency were the most common mistakes made and consequently, the most potentially harmful.

When the movie Spider-Man 3 swung into theaters a few weeks ago, it found University physics professor James Kakalios waiting. A diehard fan of superhero comics, he takes a double interest in Spidey foe Sandman, who can transform all or part of his body into living sand.
It doesn't always happen, but in the case of Sandman the writers manage to get much of the science right, Kakalios says. After 10 years researching the physics of sand and other granular materials--not to mention writing the bestselling book "The Physics of Superheroes"--he is delighted to see sand finally getting the billing it deserves.