News Articles

Cool roofs, green roofs and hybrids of the two are all of the rage for city planners who want to do something about greenhouse-gas induced warming.
They sound great but is it going to work, or is it another idealized wish that incurs cost but has little benefit (like replacing spoons in the Congressional cafeteria with corn-based alternatives that melted in soup and ending up being worse for the environment) outside public relations campaigns? 

America has a looming cost of services crisis but in the UK it's already here; people who retire expecting a certain standard of living have overwhelmed the tax base. To keep people working longer, a professor at the University of Southampton recommends the worldwide removal of the fixed or default retirement age.

There used to be a saying that we should all try to be the person our dogs think we are.
In the 21st century we idealize ourselves in online avatars, according to a new paper in Psychological Science,
 which has far-reaching implications if how you represent yourself in the virtual world of video games may affect how you behave toward others in the real world.

Hemp plants with scientifically enhanced increase in oleic acid could lead to an attractive cooking oil that is similar to olive oil in terms of fatty acid content - but has a much longer shelf life as well as greater heat tolerance and hopefully a lot less fraud associated with it than olive oil has.Using fast-track molecular plant breeding, the scientists selected hemp plants lacking the active form of an enzyme involved in making polyunsaturated fatty acids. These plants made less poly-unsaturated fatty acids and instead accumulated higher levels of the mono-unsaturated oleic acid. The research team used conventional plant breeding techniques to develop the plants into a “High Oleic Hemp” line and higher oleic acid content was demonstrated in a Yorkshire field trial.

To ancient Romans, the depiction of female nudes in mosaics were meant to invoke beauty, carnality and eroticism while male bodies reflected determination, strength and power, according to work from the Universidad Carlos III in Madrid (UC3M) that analyzed the cultural construction and ideological implications of artistic representations in which females predominate compared to those males.Sometimes art isn't just art. Prior interpretations of Roman mosaics analyzed clothing as an iconographic element that was fundamental in identifying the characters and determining their status, but a new book centers on the opposite theme: the absence of any type of clothing.

To ancient Romans, the depiction of female nudes in mosaics were meant to invoke beauty, carnality and eroticism while male bodies reflected determination, strength and power, according to work from the Universidad Carlos III in Madrid (UC3M) that analyzed the cultural construction and ideological implications of artistic representations in which females predominate compared to those males.Sometimes art isn't just art. Prior interpretations of Roman mosaics analyzed clothing as an iconographic element that was fundamental in identifying the characters and determining their status, but a new book centers on the opposite theme: the absence of any type of clothing.

Only one species of hoatzins exists in South America today - or anywhere else. Opisthocomus hoazin, also known as the Stinkbird or Canje Pheasant, has an unclear evolutionary history but was assumed to have originated in South America.Not so, it seems. The oldest known fossils of Hoatzin ancestors reveal that these birds existed around 34 million years ago in Europe, according to paleornithologists at the Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung and Flinders University in Adelaide.

You don't need to show kids a frying egg in a pan to get the message across about drugs; just show them this statistic. 
Heroin and cocaine addicts in Spain have a fatality rate that is 14.3 times higher than for the general population, and that is among people seeking treatment. For those who never seek treatment, it is probably far worse. Even users of cocaine alone have a 5.1 times higher fatality rate.

50,000 years ago, the Arctic tundra was not as drab as you might think, being an Ice Age - it was filled with colorful wildflowers and these wildflowers helped sustain woolly mammoths and other giant grazing animals, according to a new paper. The study challenges the view that the arctic landscape in the ice age was largely grasslands. 
The study looked at 50,000 years of arctic vegetation history to understand how fauna had changed with animals and humans. Historically, the belief has been that the ice age's landscape was covered by largely grass-dominated systems -- called steppe. These grasses were replaced by mosses and other boggy vegetation when the ice age ended nearly 10,000 years ago, Craine said.

A lot of coffee is grown on and around Kilimanjaro, which towers almost 20,000 feet in the air. The most traditional form of cultivation can be found in the gardens of the Chagga people. In some areas, coffee trees and other crop plants still grow in the shade of banana trees but most coffee is grown on plantations, which still feature a large number of shade trees. However, Africans reliant on coffee for income have gradually replaced legacy coffee varietals, which prefer shade, with others that are more resistant to fungi and can also grow in the sun.

Stampedes occur often, and not just in wild animal herds. Previously, physicists developed numerous models of crowd evacuation dynamics based on disasters such as the yearly Muslim Hajj or of the Love Parade disaster in Germany in 2010.
If crowd dynamics models were used for evacuation routes in those casualties, they weren't very good. A new study in EPJ B outlines a procedure for quantitatively comparing different crowd models, which also helps to compare these models with real-world data.

Wal-Mart caters to people with less money and there has long been a link between poverty and crime.
Criminologists have instead taken the additional step of implicating Wal-Mart in crime rates.
Communities across the United States saw decline in crime during the 1990s. Some said it was due to more abortions, others due to more police and a society less willing to coddle criminals. Scott Wolfe, assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of South Carolina, and David Pyrooz, assistant professor of criminal justice and criminology at Sam Houston State University, write in the British Journal of Criminology, says it had to do with Wal-Mart not being there.