News Articles

Bridges that "dance" during earthquakes could be the safest and least expensive to build, retrofit and repair, according to earthquake engineers at the University at Buffalo and MCEER.
The researchers recently developed and successfully tested the first seismic design methodology for bridge towers that respond to ground motions by literally jumping a few inches off the ground.

The new methodology allows steel truss towers that support bridge decks to be built or retrofitted at far less expense than conventional approaches, where each leg of a bridge tower is strongly anchored to its footing.
The research is funded by the U.S. Federal Highway Administration.

"HD 149026b is simply the most exotic, bizarre planet. It’s pretty small, really dense, and now we find that it’s extremely hot."
Using Spitzer, NASA’s infrared space telescope,Joseph Harrington of the University of Central Florida. and his team observed the tiny planet disappear behind its star and reappear. Although the planet cannot be seen separately from the star, the dimming of the light that reached Spitzer told the scientists how much light the hot planet emits. From this they deduced the temperature on the side of the planet facing its star. The team’s findings were published online in Nature today.

Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Scientists examining documents dating back 3,500 years say they have found proof that the origins of modern medicine lie in ancient Egypt and not with Hippocrates and the Greeks.
The research team from the KNH Centre for Biomedical Egyptology at The University of Manchester discovered the evidence in medical papyri written in 1,500BC – 1,000 years before Hippocrates was born.

Will it become the Egyptian Oath?

ESA’s X-ray observatory XMM-Newton has revealed a new class of exploding stars – where the X-ray emission ‘lives fast and dies young’.
The identification of this particular class of explosions gives astronomers a valuable new constraint to help them model and understand stellar explosions.

XMM-Newton image of M 31. Credit: ESA

The Fumanya site, in the Bergueda region of central Catalonia, is so delicate that experts cannot get physically close enough to the tracks to examine them.
In the years since the tracks were discovered they have been exposed to the elements, and as a result are severely weathered and eroding at a rapid rate.
To make things even more difficult, the tracks are imprinted into near-vertical rock faces.
Palaeontologists feared the tracks could be lost forever - but a permanent and detailed record has now been created using cutting-edge equipment.
Using a high-tech laser scanning system called RIEGL, researchers from The School of Earth, Atmospheric and Environmental have produced an interactive 3D model of a quarry face covered in thousands of tracks made by the late Cretaceous din

A research team led by Carole Thivierge, from Université Laval’s Institute of Nutraceutics and Functional Foods, shows that omega-3 fatty acids from fish oil have a positive effect on the metabolism of muscle proteins. This finding, published in a recent edition of the Journal of Physiology, could have significant implications in the fields of animal farming as well as human health.

As climate change becomes more and more a central issue in local, national, and international discussions, understanding the global carbon budget, and how it influences trends in global warming, will become increasingly crucial.
The carbon cycle is related to climate and climatic change because it controls carbon dioxide, the most important of the greenhouse gases. Dr. R. A. Houghton has authored a synthesis paper on the topic, summarizing what is known about the global carbon budget and why it is important. The work is featured in the current issue of the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Science.

In the eternal conflict between friends and parents, friends will often win because they highlight the positive aspects of sex.
Parental communication more often than not focuses on the negative aspects of sex, write Marina Epstein and L. Monique Ward from The University of Michigan.

Juicing up your cell phone or iPod may take on a whole new meaning in the future. Researchers at Saint Louis University have developed a fuel cell battery that runs on virtually any sugar source - from soft drinks to tree sap - and has the potential to operate three to four times longer on a single charge than conventional lithium ion batteries, they say.
For consumers, that could mean significantly longer time to talk and play music between charges. The new battery, which is also biodegradable, could eventually replace lithium ion batteries in many portable electronic applications, including computers, the scientists say.

A fundamental genetic mechanism that shuts down an important gene in healthy immune system cells has been discovered that could one day lead to new therapies against infections, leukemia and other cancers. Results of a University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine study on the mechanism, called a somatic stop-codon mutation, are being reported today in the online journal PLoS ONE.

Sales of herbal dietary supplements have skyrocketed by 100 percent in the United States during the last 10 years, but most people don’t consider evidence-based indications before using them, according to a University of Iowa study.
Two-thirds of people who use herbs don’t do so in accordance with guidelines, according to the article. Meanwhile, sales of herbal supplements reached $18.8 billion in 2003, up 100 percent from $8.8 billion in 1994. Those sales are subject to minimal federal regulations.

Researchers have discovered a new fact about hooded seals, a mysterious mammal that spends all but a few days each year in the ocean.
An international team of researchers led by Dr. David Coltman, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Alberta, have learned that all the hooded seal populations in the world share the same genetic diversity. The researchers reached their conclusions after analysis of more than 20 years of DNA samples taken from hundreds of hooded seals from around the world.
"These results mean that if you brought me a DNA sample of a hooded seal, I wouldn't be able to tell you where in the world you got that sample because of the genetic similarity between populations," Coltman said.