On its opening day, the London Millennium Bridge experienced unexpected swaying due to the large number of people crossing it. A new study finally explains the Millennium Bridge 'wobble' by concluding that humans did not walk the way engineers would have preferred.

It has generally been thought the Millennium Bridge 'wobble' was due to pedestrians synchronizing their footsteps with the bridge motion. However, this is not supported by measurements of the phenomenon on other bridges.

"This article says most people die in bed.  I figure if I stay out of bed, I'm safe." - Get Shorty

A map of natural hazard mortality in the United States has been produced and is featured in the  International Journal of Health Geographics.  It gives a county-level representation of the likelihood of dying as the result of natural events such as floods, earthquakes or extreme weather.

GENEVA, December 16 /PRNewswire/ -- Every product made by a luxury goods manufacturer - a watch, handbag, piece of jewellery, etc. - would be accompanied and sold with a smart device, such as a SmartCard, containing the encrypted full details of the product, ie registration number, bar code, date and place of manufacture, etc. Manufacturers, sales outlets and purchasers would then be able to use the SmartCard to verify instantly via the Internet the authenticity of the product using WISeKey-developed technology - namely, WISeAuthentic(c) (for which the patent is pending).

Dinosaur hunters on a month-long expedition to the Sahara desert have returned home in time for Christmas with more than they ever dreamed of finding. 

They have unearthed not one but two possible new species of extinct animals. Their success marks one of the most exciting discoveries to come out of Africa for 50 years. 

The team have discovered what appears to be a new type of pterosaur and a previously unknown sauropod, a species of giant plant-eating dinosaur. Both would have lived almost one hundred million years ago. 

The findings of the world's largest study on the ability of children and young people to taste and what they like have now been published jointly by Danish Science Communication and food scientists from The Faculty of Life Sciences (LIFE) at University of Copenhagen. The subjects were 8,900 Danish schoolchildren.

The short version:

- Girls have a better sense of taste than boys

- Every third child of school age prefers soft drinks which are not sweet

- Children and young people love fish

- Kids do not think of themselves as being fussy eaters

- Boys have a sweeter tooth than girls

... and this all changes when they become teenagers.

If changing the batteries in the remote control or smoke detector seems like a chore, imagine having to change hundreds of batteries in sensors scattered across a busy bridge.  That's why Kansas State University engineers are helping a semiconductor manufacturer implement its idea of an energy-harvesting radio. It could transmit important data -- like stress measurements on a bridge, for instance -- without needing a change of batteries, ever.

Bill Kuhn, K-State professor of electrical and computer engineering, and Xiaohu Zhang, master's student in electrical engineering, are developing an energy-harvesting radio for Peregrine Semiconductor, a San Diego-based integrated circuit manufacturer.

Black holes?  Maybe we should think of them as donut holes. The shape of material around black holes has been seen for the first time: an analysis of over 200 active galactic nuclei—cores of galaxies powered by disks of hot material feeding a super-massive black hole—shows that all have a consistent, ordered physical structure that seems to be independent of the black hole's size.

During launch into orbit, a satellite is exposed to a number of extreme stresses. At takeoff the extremely strong engine vibrations are transmitted via the launcher structure to the satellite, which is also exposed to a high-intensity sound levels (140 dB and more). The increasing speed of the of the rocket also leads to aerodynamic strains that turn into a shockwave when the launch vehicle's velocity jumps from subsonic to supersonic.  


That's not all. When the burned out rocket stages are blasted off and the next stage is fired up, the satellite is exposed to temporary impulsive vibrations. So how does the satellite survive earthquake-like vibrations, the forces of supersonic shock waves and the pressures of explosive blasts? 

Earth's magnetic field, which shields our planet from particles streaming outward from the Sun, often develops two holes that allow the largest leaks, according to researchers sponsored by NASA and the National Science Foundation. 

"The discovery overturns a long-standing belief about how and when most of the solar particles penetrate Earth's magnetic field, and could be used to predict when solar storms will be severe. Based on these results, we expect more severe storms during the upcoming solar cycle," said Vassilis Angelopoulos of the University of California, Los Angeles, Principal Investigator for NASA's THEMIS mission (Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms). THEMIS was used to discover the size of the leak. 

Rocky Mountain ski areas face dramatic changes this century as the climate warms, says a new Colorado study.

The study indicates snowlines -- elevations below which seasonal snowpack will not develop -- will continue to rise through this century, moving up more than 2,400 feet from the base areas of Colorado's Aspen Mountain and Utah's Park City Mountain by 2100, said University of Colorado at Boulder geography Professor Mark Williams. Williams and Brian Lazar of Stratus Consulting Inc. of Boulder combined temperature and precipitation data for Aspen Mountain and Park City Mountain with general climate circulation models for the study.