A paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says the mosquito branched off the same evolutionary tree as the house fly around 220 million years ago. Though only a few species of flies gain public attention - pests like house flies, March flies and mosquitoes – there are 152,000 named species of flies, representing around 10 per cent of all species on Earth. The March fly branched off some 175 million years ago, while the common house fly branched off about 50 million years ago.
Flies originated in wet environments and as they evolved they adapted to feed in almost any nutrient-rich substrate in almost any environment on earth.
A combination of forest byproducts and crustacean shells may be the key to removing radioactive materials from drinking water, researchers from North Carolina State University have found.
The new material is a combination of hemicellulose, a byproduct of forest materials, and chitosan, which are crustacean shells that have been crushed into a powder. It not only absorbs water, but can actually extract contaminates, such as radioactive iodide, from the water itself. The material forms a solid foam and has potential applications beyond radioactive materials. The researchers found that it has the ability to remove heavy metals, such as arsenic, from water or salt from sea water to make clean drinking water.
Many of us while growing up and listening to our bedtime stories learned to not freak out and run screaming through the streets if we thought that the “sky is falling.” As little chickens, we were taught at an early age that it was best to be brave, calm, and rational, else be considered a crazed lunatic.
There's a joke "what if schools got fully funded and the military had to run a bake sale to buy their next aircraft carrier?" I'm here to tell you how to run your own Bake Sale for Science!
Except, without the baking part. Curious how to fundraise for science? I set about fundraising and, in the process, will share lessons learned. I'll also cover how much a picosatellite costs.
For the curious space fan, think about what all the big NASA missions have. Just like Project Calliope, they have rockets and hardware and really cool science. But what they have that I lack is... Mission flight patches! Flight pins! Souvenirs!
Mitochondria are better known as the power factories of the cell but in fact they are much more interesting than that. Contrary to the old image in textbooks of round static structures, mitochondria are now known to be incredibly dynamic, shape changing, fusing and dividing according to the multitude of functions they perform in the cell. And now, in a study to be published in the journal Nature Cell Biology, scientists in Italy and Portugal show that mitochondria can also be crucial for the survival of cells during stress.
A Brief History Of Climate Science"One of the lesser-known branches of climatology is historical climatology, the study of past climates from historical records of instrumental observations and weather descriptions, ..."
Vicky Slonosky
In the comments thread of
one of the posts I wrote recently, where I discussed the
new tentative signal of a new jet-decaying particle discovered by the CDF collaboration in their data, a reader asked me if hadronic signals of single vector bosons had been seen before by CDF.
The US national debt is now at 100% of Gross National Product, in other words equal to what we produce in a year. Forty cents of every dollar the US government spends is borrowed. Horrible, cry the pundits! The government should behave more like a family with a budget, should know when to stop spending!
Let’s consider, though, that the average home-owning family takes on a mortgage equal to two or three times its annual earnings. (Before the crash, this number was five, not two or three.) In the US, it’s common for this family to spend 40% of its monthly income servicing the mortgage debt. So far, then, the government is acting exactly like a family – and a fairly responsible family at that, as we’re not even talking about families that abuse credit cards.
One of my dear readers out there wrote to me “I don't own a scale and I understand I have to measure this s**t out in mg.” Thus we introduce to the world today: Alpha Meme’s Divide and Join Portioning (DJP©).
