Madison, WI, March 16, 2009 -- One of the most significant developments in agricultural growth in modern times has been the continuous and substantial increase in corn yield over the past 80 years in the U.S. Corn Belt.

This extraordinary yield advance has been associated with both breeding of improved hybrids and the ability to grow them at increased density. In a new study, published in the January-February issue of Crop Science, researchers have investigated the importance of the effects of leaves and roots on this dramatic increase in yield in the U.S. Corn Belt, and have found that the root structure may be the key to understanding how these crops have grown so efficient.

New exciting proof that Cleopatra was of African descent and killed her sister!

Really?

Yes, if you believe the BBC. The story, reported by AFP, the Times, and the Daily Telegraph, goes like this: In the 1920s a tomb at Ephesus in Turkey was opened which contained a single skeleton. The skull was removed, measured, and subsequently lost. More recently, a team of Austrian archaeologists have reexamined what's left of the skeleton, determining it to be the body of an apparently healthy young
female.

Continued from Part 1, Why Not Try A Scientific Approach To Science Education?

In a traditional science class, the teacher stands at the front of the class lecturing to a largely passive group of students. Those students then go off and do back-of-the-chapter homework problems from the textbook and take exams that are similar to those exercises.

With a group of friends, classmates or co-workers, offer to auction a $20 bill. One more rule: both of the top two bidders must pay their final bid.

Imagine that person A and person B are foolish enough to join your auction, with person A bidding $0.25 and person B overbidding to the tune of $0.30. Obviously this should escalate—who wouldn’t bid $7 to earn $20, especially if this could keep you from losing money you previously bid?

The climate change skeptic asks - 'Given that the climate changes over millenia due to powerful natural forces, how could humans possibly contribute any significant effect to climate change, given our brief existence in geological time?'

I shall try to answer that question with examples from engineering which show how short-term pulse events can significantly affect long-term cyclic events.

The Influence of Short-Term Events on Long-Term Events.

Synchronized, goal-directed actions are nothing new; that concept is the foundation of civilization.   But it goes much deeper than previously realized, according to research in BMC Neuroscience.    It isn't just voluntary cooperation that happens, sometimes it is at the unconscious brain level.

A new study shows that when musicians play along together it isn't just their instruments that are working together, it is happening at the brain wave level also.  The research details how EEG readouts from pairs of guitarists become more synchronized, a finding with wider potential implications for how our brains interact when we do.

Want to see a collision between the cores of two merging galaxies, each powered by a black hole with a  millions of times the mass of the sun?

You're in luck.   NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope recently caught that very thing.   The galactic cores are in a single, tangled galaxy called NGC 6240, located 400-million light years away in the constellation Ophiuchus. Millions of years ago, each core was the dense center of its own galaxy before the two galaxies collided and ripped each other apart. Now, these cores are approaching each other at tremendous speeds and preparing for the final cataclysmic collision. They will crash into each other in a few million years, a relatively short period on a galactic timescale.

Sixty-one teams from Southern California, Arizona, Brazil and Chile faced off in the Los Angeles regional FIRST Robotics Competition on March 13 and 14. JPL sponsored nine of the schools in this annual engineering and technology contest held at the Long Beach Convention Center. 

The teams from Centinela Valley Union High School District, Lawndale; Atascadero High School, Atascadero; and the NASA-sponsored Bishop Alemany High School, Mission Hills, won the regional competition and will compete in the FIRST championship competition in Atlanta, from April 16-19. Chaminade College Preparatory, in West Hills, won the competition's highest award, the Regional Chairman's Award, and will also go to Atlanta. 

A herd of young birdlike dinosaurs met their death on the muddy margins of a lake some 90 million years ago, according to a team of Chinese and American paleontologists that excavated a site in the Gobi Desert in western Inner Mongolia.  The sudden death of the herd in a mud trap provides a rare snapshot of social behavior. Composed entirely of juveniles of a single species of ornithomimid dinosaur (Sinornithomimus dongi), the herd suggests that immature individuals were left to fend for themselves when adults were preoccupied with nesting or brooding.

Sometimes different is good.  You may not want a strange cup of coffee when you go to Starbucks and you would like for your car to work the way cars should, but in science the peculiar can teach us a lot.
 
This was the idea behind Halton Arp’s catalogue of Peculiar Galaxies that appeared in the 1960s. One of the oddballs listed there is Arp 261, which has now been imaged in more detail than ever before using the FORS2 instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope.