Applied Physics

Coffee To The Rescue- Roasting Process Helps With Alternative Energy

We all know that coffee can cure everything. Now it turns out that even a coffee roasting process- torrefaction- could give biomass a power boost, increasing the energy content of some energy crops by up to 20 percent, making biofuels merely bad instead of ...

Article - News Staff - May 21 2008 - 11:59am

The Genetics Of Fat Storage In Cells

New research by the Gladstone Institutes of Cardiovascular Disease (GICD) and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), has revealed the genetic determinants of fat storage in cells, which may lead to a new understanding of and potential treatmen ...

Article - News Staff - May 21 2008 - 4:38pm

Lifestyle Groups And Ecological Niches In Marine Bacteria

It isn't just people. Marine bacteria also organize into professions or lifestyle groups that partition many resources rather than competing for them. Microbes with one lifestyle, such as free-floating cells, flourish in proximity with closely related ...

Article - News Staff - May 23 2008 - 4:06pm

Pursuing The Scalar Fields Mystery

Do scalar fields exist across the whole universe? Unlike gravitational or magnetic fields, which have both strength and direction, scalar fields have strength alone, varying from point to point. They definitely exist within some closed systems, such as the ...

Article - News Staff - May 23 2008 - 1:18pm

Biofuels Research Makes A Plant Evolution Discovery

Biologists have discovered that a fundamental building block in the cells of flowering plants evolved independently, yet almost identically, on a separate branch of the evolutionary tree--in an ancient plant group called lycophytes that originated at least ...

Article - News Staff - May 24 2008 - 1:31pm

Growing Human Heart Tissue From Embryonic Stem Cells

We understand in amazing detail how a heart develops- in mice. Whether the same processes that produce mouse heart tissue also generate heart tissue in humans has been unclear, because we obviously can't do the required experiments on human embryos. B ...

Article - Michael White - May 26 2008 - 11:05am

Using Microalgae Photosynthesis To Eliminate CO2 Emissions

Scientists of the University of Almeria are developing a new system to eliminate carbon dioxide emissions using microalgae photosynthetic activity. This project, called CENIT CO2, is being developed by Spanish electricity company Endesa and is supported by ...

Article - News Staff - May 26 2008 - 1:57pm

SnoMotes Go Where No One Wants To Tread

The best places to get accurate data about the world's ice shelves are not exactly the safest. Using satellites is not an accurate solution. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Pennsylvania State University have created specially de ...

Article - News Staff - May 27 2008 - 5:35pm

Geo-Engineering: Really Big Sunglasses To Reduce Global Warming

As fossil fuel emissions continue to climb, reducing the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth would definitely have a cooling effect on surface temperatures. The reduction in sunlight can be accomplished by geoengineering schemes. There are two classes: th ...

Article - News Staff - May 27 2008 - 9:53pm

The Future Is Not Plastics- It's Protein Fibrils

Amyloid deposits in tissues and organs are linked to a number of diseases, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, type II diabetes, and prion diseases such as BSE. However, amyloids are not just pathological substances; they have potential as a nanomaterials. ...

Article - News Staff - May 28 2008 - 11:01am