Tonight you have a chance to contribute to science -namely, the knowledge of our solar system- and have a lot of fun at the same time. Do you want to know how ? Then please read on.
Comet Swift-Tuttle (left, courtesy NASA) may be far away by now, but the debris that gets thrown out in space during each of its passages in the proximity of our Sun traces the full elliptical orbit of the comet, like droplets of sweat of an athlete running the 10,000 meters in a stadium. And tonight, the Earth is going to plunge in the core of the filament of debris following the comet's orbit.
Folsom, CA – August 11, 2009 – On Monday, August 17th at 1:30PM in Hensill Hall 113, attendees of the 90th Annual Pacific Division Meeting of the AAAS in San Francisco will get to learn about the latest efforts in science communication from some of the brightest minds in the field.
The symposium is called “Good Science is Only Part of the Job: Communicating Science to the Public.” (Online link:
http://www.sou.edu/aaaspd/2009SANFRANCISCO/Symposia09.html#15).
I finally got around to reading Carl Sagan’s The Variety of Scientific Experience, a volume edited by his wife, Ann Druyan, and based on a series of Gifford Lectures on Natural Theology that Carl delivered in 1985 at the University of Glasgow.
I recently read an article regarding a specific
therapist's idea for a movement to treat World of Warcraft players with video game addiction. These types of articles are not uncommon,
World of Warcraft (
WoW) currently has millions of subscribers worldwide so there is an interest in anything
Biology has just gotten a new set of standards for graphically representing biological information, biology's equivalent of the circuit diagram in electronics.
Researchers at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) and their colleagues say this visual language should make it easier to exchange complex information, so that models are accurate, efficient and readily understandable. The new standard, called the Systems Biology Graphical Notation (SBGN), is published today in Nature Biotechnology.
100 years ago you had to be rich to be fat. Now apparently you have to be rich to stay thin. And women add more pounds being poor than anyone.
A nationwide study that followed participants for 14 years correlates the U.S. Food Stamp Program to obesity among its users.
Researchers found that the average user of food stamps had a Body Mass Index (BMI) 1.15 points higher than non-users. The link between food stamps and higher weight was almost entirely based on women users, who averaged 1.24 points higher BMI than those not in the program, the study found. For an average American woman, this would mean an increase in weight of 5.8 pounds.
Magnetotactic bacteria are the smallest organisms to use a
biological compass but exactly how these bacteria create their cellular magnets is a mystery. In a study published online in
Genome Research, scientists have used genome sequencing to unlock new secrets about these magnetic microbes that could accelerate biotechnology and nanotechnology research.
Language networks are built based on different principles and, for the most part, are designed to be scale-free. Global statistical properties of language networks are independent of linguistic structure and typology so do linguistic structures really influence the statistical properties of a language network? More concretely, does semantic or conceptual network have the same properties as a syntactic one?
Researchers at the Institute of Applied Linguistics at Communication University of China say they have shown that dynamic semantic network of human language is also small-world and scale-free but it is different from syntactic network in hierarchical structure and node's degree correlation.
Despite the overwhelming abundance of water on the planet and in our lives, the molecular structure of water has remained a mystery.
In all, water exhibits 66 known anomalies, including a strangely varying density, large heat capacity and high surface tension. Contrary to other "normal" liquids, which become denser as they get colder, water reaches its maximum density at about 4° Celsius. Above and below this temperature, water is less dense; this is why, for example, lakes freeze from the surface down.
Water also has an unusually large capacity to store heat, which stabilizes the temperature of the oceans, and a high surface tension, which allows insects to walk on water, droplets to form and trees to transport water to great heights.
There are many hypotheses about the early days of black holes. Researchers writing in The Astrophysical Journal Letters have undertaken simulations using data taken from observations of the cosmic background radiation—the earliest view of the structure of the universe - and then applied the basic laws that govern the interaction of matter. In doing so, they say they have allowed the early universe in their simulation to evolve as they believe it did in reality.
