Researchers writing in Current Biology say they may have determined what makes musical notes sound good (or bad) by studying the preferences of more than 250 college students from Minnesota to a variety of musical and nonmusical sounds.
WASP-12b is the hottest known planet in the Milky Way galaxy, and it may also be the shortest-lived. The planet is being eaten by its parent star, according to observations made by a new instrument on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS). The planet may only have another 10 million years left before it is completely devoured. The discovery has been documented in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
WASP-12 is a yellow dwarf star located approximately 600 light-years away in the winter constellation Auriga. The exoplanet was discovered by the United Kingdom's Wide Area Search for Planets (WASP) in 2008. The automated survey looks for the periodic dimming of stars from planets passing in front of them, an effect called transiting.
Scientists have developed the first cell controlled by a synthetic genome which may allow them to probe the basic machinery of life and engineer bacteria specially designed to solve environmental or energy problems.
The research team, led by Craig Venter, has already chemically synthesized a bacterial genome, and transplanted the genome of one bacterium to another. Now, the scientists have put both methods together, to create what they call a "synthetic cell," although only its genome is synthetic.
Albert Einstein said scientists would never be able to observe the instantaneous velocity of tiny particles as they randomly shake and shimmy, so called Brownian motion, but physicist at the University of Texas say they have done so.
In 1907, Einstein likely did not foresee a time when dust-sized particles of glass could be trapped and suspended in air by dual laser beam "optical tweezers." Nor would he have known that ultrasonic vibrations from a plate-like transducer would shake those glass beads into the air to be tweezed and measured as they moved in suspension.
Birds wouldn't be happy in a Trader Joe's, it seems. Stuffed with aisles full of organically grown, gluten-free, range fed deliciousness, birds would see through expensive marketing and know that, nutritionally, organic food is no better, it is just a different process.
And scientist birds would be confused why no one in the food industry knows what the word 'organic' means.
What Is The Meaning Of "organic" (and Inorganic) Food? by
professor Lee Silver
It's been several months since Michael White invited me to blog here at Scientific Blogging. I think the immediate occasion for his invitation was a conversation we had about Douglas Hofstadter's 2007 book I Am a Strange Loop. I don't remember the details of what I said in that conversation, but I guess something in it made Mike think that I had something to offer here. That conversation was one of many we've enjoyed over the past year on topics at least potentially relevant to the bloggers and readers on this site: science fiction, science books written for a general public, the academy, the relationship between science and the humanities.
Finally, the Bose-Einstein Correlations article by CMS to which I have personally contributed during the last few months
is now an arxiv entry, and has been sent to
Physical Review Letters. This is a success for the CMS collaboration, since we are the first to measure this effect in the new LHC proton-proton collisions, at 0.9 and 2.36 TeV of center-of-mass energy.
My recent article The Origins of Virtue sparked a discussion in which Josh Witten has assumed that Gerhard Adam and I are confused as to the subject of genic selection. The confusion lies entirely with Josh, but the matter deserves clarification for readers.
Gerhard and I (I hope I’m not putting words into Gerhard’s mouth that he would find unpalatable!) have no problem with the purely technical aspects of genic selection. The problem arises when conclusions are derived from these studies that are of a purely personal nature, mere opinions and prejudices with no scientific basis. As a self-styled champion of the scientific method, Josh should be supporting us in this endeavour, unfortunately the opposite is the case.
Heavy alcohol consumption carries a lot of significant health risks, and researchers from the University of Texas say men who drink too much face a higher risk of pancreatic cancer.
In a study published in Cancer Causes and Control, researchers found that the more alcohol a man consumed, the higher his risk of pancreatic cancer compared with those who drank little or no alcohol.
Men who consumed alcohol increased their risk of pancreatic cancer by 1.5 to 6 times compared with those who didn't consume alcohol or who had less than one drink per month. The increased risk depended on the amount and frequency of alcohol consumption. Researchers found that the risk was greater no matter when in the past heavy drinking occurred.
Data from the ESA's Envisat radar satellite shows that the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill has entered the Loop Current, a powerful conveyor belt that flows clockwise around the Gulf of Mexico towards Florida.
"With these images from space, we have visible proof that at least oil from the surface of the water has reached the current," said Dr Bertrand Chapron of Ifremer, the French Research Institute for Exploitation of the Sea.
Dr Chapron and Dr Fabrice Collard of France's CLS have been combining surface roughness and current flow information with Envisat Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) data of the area to monitor the proximity of the oil to the current.
