Researchers at the University of Copenhagen and Aarhus have shown they are able to use the radiocarbon dating method to study special proteins in the lens of the eye - they use a nuclear accelerator to determine the amount of Carbon-14 in as little as one milligram of lens tissue and thereby calculate the year of birth.

This will enable forensic scientists to establish the birth date of an unidentified body and could also eventually be used in cancer research.

The lens of the eye is made up of transparent proteins called crystallins. These are packed so tightly together and in such a particular way, that they behave like crystals, allowing light to pass through the lens of the eye so that we can see.

Ten years ago, astronomers made the stunning discovery that the universe is expanding at a faster pace today than it did in the past.

“Explaining why the expansion of the Universe is currently accelerating is certainly the most fascinating question in modern cosmology,” says Luigi Guzzo, lead author of a paper in this week’s issue of Nature, in which the new results are presented. “We have been able to show that large surveys that measure the positions and velocities of distant galaxies provide us with a new powerful way to solve this mystery.”

“This implies that one of two very different possibilities must hold true,” explains Enzo Branchini, member of the team.

AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France, January 30 /PRNewswire/ --

- New service simplifies customer support and reduces total cost of ownership of Psion Teklogix' line of rugged mobile computers

AACHEN, Germany, January 30 /PRNewswire/ --

- New Deal Advances the Company's Groundbreaking Smart Shape Memory Polymer (BIO-SMP(TM)) Commercialization Program -

PITTSBURGH, January 30 /PRNewswire/ --

Panopto, Inc. announced today the availability of CourseCast 1.5, the newest version of the lecture-capture technology developed and first implemented at Carnegie Mellon University. CourseCast 1.5 is available to qualified academic institutions free of charge through the Socrates Project.

CourseCast enables educators to capture, edit, index, archive and stream video and audio over the Internet. CourseCast gives students on-demand access to indexed lectures and course material, enabling them to experience or revisit entire lectures, or to focus on segments of their choice. CourseCast is easily deployed using standard PCs and peripherals, which substantially drives down the cost of lecture-capture deployment.

CHICAGO, January 30 /PRNewswire/ --

- Facilitates Easy Understanding of Business Information by Everyday Business People

ADVIZOR Solutions(R) today released version 5.3 of its business analysis and reporting software suite. Built on world-class data visualization and in-memory-management, ADVIZOR empowers business people to understand and analyze information without relying on others to prepare or interpret the results.

LUDWIGSHAFEN, Germany, January 30 /PRNewswire/ -- Surely you know of those practical plastic pouches which heat-up as soon as you bend the metal platelet inside. A good thing to have during winter: warm fingers are just a pants pocket away. But how does it work without fire or a battery? Another secret that can be revealed through chemistry. In entertaining weekly episodes our Chemical Reporter answers questions of our podcast listeners on chemistry in our everyday life.

Direct subscription via RSS-Feed or iTunes (search for "basf"):

http://corporate.basf.com/en/podcast/reporter.xml

Podcast The Chemical Reporter, English edition:

http://www.basf.com/podcast

More podcasts:

Podcast Chemistry of Innovations: http://www.basf.com/podcast

Why do some people solve problems more creatively than others? Are people who think creatively somehow different from those who tend to think in a more methodical fashion?

These questions are part of a long-standing debate, with some researchers arguing that what we call “creative thought” and “noncreative thought” are not basically different. If this is the case, then people who are thought of as creative do not really think in a fundamentally different way from those who are thought of as noncreative. On the other side of this debate, some researchers have argued that creative thought is fundamentally different from other forms of thought. If this is true, then those who tend to think creatively really are somehow different.

Using mice as models, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology traced some of the differences between humans and chimpanzees to differences in our diet.

Humans consume a distinct diet compared to other apes. Not only do we consume much more meat and fat, but we also cook our food. It has been hypothesized that adopting these dietary patterns played a key role during human evolution. However, to date, the influence of diet on the physiological and genetic differences between humans and other apes has not been widely examined.

By feeding laboratory mice different human and chimp diets over a mere two week period, researchers at the Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, were able to reconstruct some of the physiological and genetic differences observed between humans and chimpanzees.