Applied Physics

Want To Find Dark Matter? Listen For WIMPS

A team of researchers in Canada say they have made a bold stride in the struggle to detect dark matter- and it involves listening and WIMPS. The PICASSO collaboration has documented the discovery of a significant difference between the acoustic signals in ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 16 2008 - 12:32am

Why Did Lambeosaurs Have Crests On Their Heads? To Communicate, It Seems

Paleontologists have long debated the function of the strange, bony crests on the heads of the duck-billed dinosaurs known as lambeosaurs. The structures contain incredibly long, convoluted nasal passages that loop up over the tops of their skulls. Scienti ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 16 2008 - 10:36am

Maybe We Should Stop Calling It Junk DNA?

Nothing drives biologists crazier than people who think the colloquial meaning of 'junk' means junk DNA is valueless. For about 15 years, scientists have known that certain junk DNA, repetitive DNA segments previously thought to have no function, ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 16 2008 - 9:17pm

'Plug-and-Play' Synthetic RNA Device

Engineers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have created a "plug-and-play" synthetic RNA device--a sort of eminently customizable biological computer--that is capable of taking in and responding to more than one biological or ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 18 2008 - 1:18am

Bloodhound SSC- A Car Moving At One Thousand Miles Per Hour

What does it take to build a car capable of going 1,000 MPH, 30% faster than any car that has gone before?  Richard Noble of Swansea University and lead of the aerodynamics team for the BLOODHOUND SSC (super sonic car) Project, intends to find out by 2011 ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 23 2008 - 9:30am

Circuit Engineering Technique Helps Identify Disease-Causing Genes

Scientists believe that complex diseases such as schizophrenia, major depression and cancer are not caused by one, but a multitude of dysfunctional genes. A novel computational biology method developed by a research team led by Ali Abdi, PhD,  associate pr ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 29 2008 - 12:45am

Carbon Nanotube Mass Sensor Weighs Atoms With Super Resolution

A group of researchers led by Adrian Bachtold of the CIN2 laboratory in Spain has developed an ultrasensitive mass sensor, which can measure tiny amounts of mass with atomic precision, and with an unprecedented resolution to date.  The CIN2 (Research Cente ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 2 2008 - 12:22am

Bioengineering Wonder- DNA 'Tweezers'

Researchers in China writing in Journal of the American Chemical Society are reporting development of a new DNA "tweezers" that are the first of their kind capable of grasping and releasing objects on-demand. The microscopic tweezers could have s ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 3 2008 - 11:47am

Portable Magnetosphere Could Make A Mission To Mars Safe

According to the international space agencies, 'space weather' like radiation from the sun and cosmic rays in a solar storm, is the single greatest obstacle to deep space travel.  New research out today in Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion sho ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 4 2008 - 12:41am

CESAR- King Of The Rovers

A robot rover designed by a Bremen university team has won an ESA contest to retrieve soil samples from a lunar-style terrestrial crater. Eight student teams fielded rovers during the event, their progress monitored by an advanced 3-D viewer already flight ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 4 2008 - 11:58am