According to new research conducted by scientists from the University of Maryland and the Ecole Centrale de Lyon in France, smokers may face another serious health risk from the habit and the tobacco industry may have another serious PR problem on their hands as a result.
A study appearing in the upcoming issue of Environmental Health Perspectives suggests that Cigarettes are "widely contaminated" with bacteria, including some known to cause disease in people. The research team describes the study as the first to show that "cigarettes themselves could be the direct source of exposure to a wide array of potentially pathogenic microbes among smokers and other people exposed to secondhand smoke."
Many politicians see government welfare as the best way to address the problem of poverty in society. President Barack Obama, for example, recently promised to halve poverty within ten years, and his Republican opponent, John McCain, similarly vowed to make poverty eradication a top priority of his Administration.
Others, however, say that even in the current economic situation, in developed countries, this kind of rhetoric about cutting "poverty" is misleadingly outmoded—because it implicitly suggests that government income transfers are the best vehicle for achieving substantial reductions in poverty.
Virtually limitless sources of energy are everywhere. One such potential source is energy from ocean waves that could be used to generate electric power. Yet as engineers test new technologies for capturing it, the devices are plagued by battering storms, limited efficiency, and the need to be tethered to the seafloor.
Currently, a team of aerospace engineers is attempting to address these setbacks by applying the principles that keep airplanes aloft to create a new wave-energy system that is durable, extremely efficient, and can be placed anywhere in the ocean, regardless of depth.
Following up their 2000 discovery of an ancient reptile commonly referred to as SuperCroc, paleontologists from the University of Chicago and McGill University today unveiled key fossils of five previously unknown or poorly understood crocodile species. Most of them walked "upright" with their arms and legs under the body like land mammals, with their bellies touching the ground. The discoveries are reported in the latest issue of ZooKeys.
The five new species, dubbed BoarCroc, RatCroc, DuckCroc, DogCroc and PancakeCroc by University of Chicago Paleontologist Paul Sereno, lived roughly 100 million years ago and ultimately survived the dinosaurs.
Considering the people and things most often googled these days, it maybe surprising to learn that search engines play a much bigger role in our lives than just helping us find pictures of Megan Fox and mildly entertaining videos of would-be wrestlers in their backyards. Specifically, search engines are becoming a major part of how we learn, according to research published in the November issue of Information Processing and Management.
