Berkeley, CA — The installed price of solar photovoltaic (PV) power systems in the United States fell substantially in 2011 and through the first half of 2012, according to the latest edition of Tracking the Sun, an annual PV cost-tracking report produced by the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).

The median installed price of residential and commercial PV systems completed in 2011 fell by roughly 11 to 14 percent from the year before, depending on system size, and, in California, prices fell by an additional 3 to 7 percent within the first six months of 2012. These recent installed price reductions are attributable, in large part, to dramatic reductions in PV module prices, which have been falling precipitously since 2008.

The percentage of Americans who say they are strong in their religious faith has been steady for the last four decades but a new sociology analysis claims that religious groups who have become more staunchly devout have surged while others, notably Roman Catholics, who have sought to become more liberal under Vatican II in that time, have faded in popularity.

Catholics now report the lowest proportion of strongly affiliated followers among major American religious traditions. The drop in intensity could present challenges for the Roman Catholic Church in the U.S., the study suggests, both in terms of church participation and in Catholics' support for the Church's social and theological positions.

Update: I got a confirmation that at the latest INFN board of directors meeting the news was given that the Super-B factory to be built outside Rome is no more. Super-B joins other remarkable projects in high-energy physics -notably the SSC, the American 40-TeV super-collider to be built in Texas, and killed by Congress in 1993- in the dust bin.

With this move the Italian government shows again how little they care for basic research in Italy, and provides further fuel to the escape of bright researchers to other countries.

What happens when the modern evolutionary theory of punctuated equilibrium collides with the older theory of mosaic evolution? That's the issue addressed by paleobiologists Melanie J Hopkins at the Museum fuer Naturkunde Berlin and Scott Lidgard at the Field Museum in Chicago.  

The race is on to blame everything related to ecological change on human footprints - even the past can be re-framed as anthropocenic climate change and University of Massachusetts Amherst geoscientists have shown how to do just that, by using a biomarker from human feces in a completely new way to establish the first human presence, the arrival of grazing animals and human population dynamics in a landscape.

Elsevier has launched a new, international, open access journal, Case Studies in Engineering Failure Analysis. 

The findings of a U.C. San Diego study conclude that marine (saltwater) algae can be just as efficient as freshwater algae in producing biofuels. 

The availability of significant saltwater environments for algae production is obvious. According to a Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's (PNNL) report, algal fuels grown in saline water from existing aquifers and recycling nutrients would be able to provide up to twice the goal for advanced biofuels set under the Energy Independence and Security Act - roughly 40 billion gallons or 20 percent of annual transportation fuel demand.  

The wetting model is a classical problem in surface and biomimetic science.  Wettability is determined by the balance between adhesive and cohesive forces, adhesive which is when a liquid tries to spread on a surface and cohesive when it forms into a ball.

The resultant between adhesive and cohesive forces is called the contact angle. As the tendency of a drop to spread out over a surface increases, the contact angle decreases, making the contact angle an inverse measure of wettability.

Various drugs companies have tried to produce antibodies that bind to the type 1 insulin-like growth factor, or IGF-1, receptor on the cell surface, which has a critical part to play in the development of cancer - but have had little success.

Understanding more about how these antibodies work may help explain why only some cancer patients are helped by IGF-1 blockers during clinical tests. 

New research found a more than four-fold increase in the incidence of breast cancer in women with neurofibromatosis-1 (NF1), which adds to evidence that women with this rare genetic disorder may benefit from early breast cancer screening (mammograms) beginning at age 40, and manual breast exams as early as adolescence.