What do presidential candidate Barack Obama and Snapple Iced Tea have in common? Patricia Turner, professor of African American and African studies at the University of California, Davis, whose research focuses on urban legends and conspiracy theories, notes that Snapple had to grapple with two false rumors when it became a sensation in 1993.


Did you ever hear that Snapple has ties to pro-life extremists or that it was owned by the Ku Klux Klan?  We haven't either but apparently that's what some people said and some people believed. 

A revolutionary heart operation technique using cutting edge technology will be performed on Monday 20 October and broadcast live to delegates at the Heart Rhythm Congress 2008 taking place in Birmingham.

The procedure to tackle heart rhythm disorder will be performed by Dr Andre Ng, Senior Lecturer in Cardiology at the University of Leicester and a Consultant Cardiologist at the University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust.

He will use technology that allows rapid and accurate location of the origin of the heart rhythm disturbance in a 3-dimensional geometry of the heart chambers and guides successful treatment with the use of catheter ablation.

Did you know there was such a thing as 'Quantum Darwinism'?  Indeed there is, and it postulates the theory that quantum mechanical states are selected and reproduced.

Theoretical proof of stable and measurable states extending over two quantum dots and creating offspring has now been provided, say researchers at the Institute of Physics at the University of Leoben, together
with colleagues from the Arizona State University. This supports the notion of what is known as Quantum Darwinism, which makes the selection and reproduction of quantum mechanical states responsible for the
way in which our reality is perceived.
 

New Jersey Institute of Technology professor Bruce Bukiet, a mathematician who has applied mathematical modeling techniques to the dynamics of scoring in baseball, has computed the probability of the Rays and Phillies winning the World Series now that the Rays have defeated the Boston Red Sox in the American League Championship Series. He recently released the names of those most deserving of Major League Baseball's prestigious 2008 Most Valuable Player (MVP) and Cy Young awards.

This is the eighth year that Bukiet has used his model to determine whether it is worthwhile to wager on games each day of the baseball season. His picks (posted on www.egrandslam.com) have led to positive results for six of the past eight years.

Heavy advertising by both Democratic and Republican presidential candidates during the 2008 election may actually make voters in battleground states more confused about which candidate to vote for, a new study suggests. 

A nationwide study found that voters in heavily contested states like Florida and Ohio become more ambivalent when they are exposed to a lot of opposing messages from the two candidates.

Despite thousands of years of research, astronomers know next to nothing about how the universe is structured. One theory is that large galaxies are clustered together on structures similar to giant soap bubbles, with tinier galaxies sprinkled on the surface of this "soapy" layer. 

New observations from Tel Aviv University may be giving new strength to this theory. A team led by Dr. Noah Brosch, Director of the Tel Aviv University-owned Wise Observatory, say they have uncovered what they believe are visible traces of a "filament" of dark matter –– an entity on which galaxies meet, cluster and form. A filament can originate at the junction of two "soap bubbles," where the thin membrane is thicker.

The most advanced and powerful electron microscope on the planet—capable of unprecedented resolution—has been installed in the new Canadian Centre for Electron Microscopy at McMaster University.

Introduced last year, it is called the Titan 80-300 Cubed - “cubed” because of its fully enclosed profile -  transmission electron microscope (TEM) and its ultra-high resolution is enabled by its design that combines—for the first time ever on a single instrument, according to the FEI company—two Cs-aberration correctors and a monochromator.

Built in the Netherlands by the FEI Company at a cost of $15-million, the Titan cluster will examine at the nano level hundreds of everyday products in order to understand, manipulate and improve their efficiency, says John Preston, director of McMaster's Brockhouse Institute for Materials Research.

Sandia scientists are helping train Iraqi scientists and technicians to clean up radioactively contaminated sites and safely dispose of the radioactive wastes as part of the Iraqi Nuclear Facility Dismantlement and Disposal Program.

Nalini Nadkarni of Evergreen State College currently advises a team of researchers who sport shaved heads, tattooed biceps and prison-issued garb rather than the lab coats and khakis typically worn by researchers. Why is Nadkarni's team composed of such apparently iconoclastic researchers? Because all of her researchers are inmates at Cedar Creek Corrections Center, a medium security prison in Littlerock, Washington.

Why did Nadkarni recruit inmates into her research team? "Because," she explains, "I need help from people who have long periods of time available to observe and measure the growing mosses; access to extensive space to lay out flats of plants; and fresh minds to put forward innovative solutions."

University of Utah geologists identified an amazing concentration of dinosaur footprints that they call “a dinosaur dance floor,” located in a wilderness on the Arizona-Utah border where there was a sandy desert oasis 190 million years ago.

The three-quarter-acre site – which includes rare dinosaur tail-drag marks – provides more evidence there were wet intervals during the Early Jurassic Period, when the U.S. Southwest was covered with a field of sand dunes larger than the Sahara Desert.