Vincent van Gogh's series of sunflower paintings, while spectacular to fans of his work, have also intrigued scientists because they depict a mutation whose genetic basis was a mystery. In a new study, a team of University of Georgia scientists reveal the mutation behind the distinctive, thick bands of yellow "double flowers" that the post-Impressionist artist painted more than 100 years ago.
SCUBA-2, the most powerful camera ever developed for observing light at ‘sub-mm’ wavelengths (light that has a wavelength 1000 times longer than we can see with our eyes), has begun a revolutionary new study of cosmic star-formation history.
There was a time when people on the right trusted science far more than moderates and liberals. Distrust of scientists, including levels that verged on raging paranoia, was limited to the left side of the political spectrum.
“Body odor sampling is an essential tool in human chemical ecology research.”
Are you ugly? Maybe that's something else to blame your mother about.
Female cognitive ability can impact how handsome males become over evolutionary time, say biologists from The University of Texas at Austin, Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Males across the animal world have evolved elaborate traits to attract females, from huge peacock tails to complex bird songs and frog calls. But there is a price - predators are attracted to increased elaboration, placing an enormous cost to males with these sexy traits. In a new paper, a group of biologists have shown that females can also limit the evolution of increased elaboration.
The region around the Hubble Deep Field (HDF), originally captured by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) in the mid 1990s, led to the discovery of numerous galaxies billions of light years distant and provided direct visual evidence of the evolution of the Universe. First results from the new imaging, which uses observations from the UK's newly upgraded e-MERLIN radio telescope array together with the EVLA radio array based in New Mexico, show galaxies some 7 billion light years away in unprecedented detail.
After WikiLeaks released classified and sensitive government documents, predictions of the scale and significance of their impact were overstated.
The desire/hope of proponents that the WikiLeaks disclosures of 2010 meant conventional mechanisms for controlling government-held information wee breaking down, heralding a new world of 'radical transparency', were short-lived. Old-style secrecy is still there, argues Alasdair Roberts of Suffolk University Law School. Leak, publish, and wait for the inevitable outrage is easily defeated in practice.
It turns out radical transparency is hard to achieve and a technological fix alone will not do it.
A device the size of a home washing machine uses bacteria growing in municipal sewage to make electricity - and also clean up the sewage at the same time.
Current wastewater treatment technology involves a number of steps designed to separate the solid and liquid components of sewage and clean the wastewater before it is released into a waterway. This often involves settling tanks, macerators that break down larger objects, membranes to filter particles, biological digestion steps and chemicals that kill harmful microbes. One estimate puts their energy use at 2 percent of overall consumption in the U.S.
“And then I was like FUUUUUU”. This is how stories end nowadays. I dare to make a claim about the flow of stories because I believe the ontology of stories follows a predictable and stable pattern and it is this: I present to you a situation in which I was involved, usually as the protagonist. The story is semantically segmented and usually sequenced in sets of 4-6, which culminate in climactic revelation of emotion. Do you know what I meme when I say emotion? I mean forever alone guy, Y U NO guy, Trollface, rage guy, and the others from the gang.
While most High-Energy Physicists nowadays are kept busy with the idle search for non-existent new physics beyond the standard model in the form of improbable Supersymmetric particles, phantom leptoquarks, fairy Z' resonances, putative colorons, invented gravitinos, and what not, the subset of lucky experimentalists who decided to go against the flow and kept their feet on the ground are provided with endless entertainment in the study of resonances that are as real as your breakfast today.
