Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and UC Berkeley say they have demonstrated a way to fabricate efficient solar cells from low-cost, flexible materials; optically active semiconductors in arrays of nanoscale pillars, each a single crystal, with dimensions measured in billionths of a meter.
Want to live forever but
starving is not for you? A study published in
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences may be more to your liking.
Sulfate gets all the attention but iron and manganese compounds may be important role in converting methane to carbon dioxide and eventually carbonates in the Earth's oceans, according to a team of researchers looking at anaerobic sediments.
Those same compounds may also have been key to methane reduction in the early, oxygenless days of the planet's atmosphere. On the early Earth, where oxygen was absent from the atmosphere, sulfates were scarce.
Stirling Energy Systems (SES) and Tessera Solar recently unveiled four newly designed solar power collection dishes at Sandia National Laboratories’ National Solar Thermal Test Facility (NSTTF).
Sandia’s concentrating solar-thermal power (CSP) team has been working closely with SES over the past five years to improve the system design and operation.
I’ve been prompted to write this because of the misconceptions about the concept of the “Selfish Gene” in Evolutionary theory – evident in both blog replies on this site and more widely.
I get really irritated when I see writers in the social sciences characterise evolutionary biology as somehow being based on the same assumptions as rational choice theory. Here is the first paragraph from a book chapter I saw today which motivated me to start this blog and write this entry...
A new public document has been made available on the CMS public web page yesterday morning. It reports on a study of the reach of the CMS detector, with data collectable in 2010, for a signal of large extra dimensions, using the very distinctive signature of a high-energy jet recoiling against -well, recoiling against nothing; or better, something which left our world and entered into another dimension of space.
In light of the popularity of
this piece, here are some things to keep in mind about 'selfish' genes:
1. The basic issue is about the unit of selection - does natural selection choose allele, individuals, populations, or species? The answer, like most things in biology, is yes, as Douglas Futuyma puts it in his standard textbook on evolution (p. 354. 3rd edition):
If, then, our concept of levels of selection includes causality, natural selection can act at the level of the gene (as in meiotic drive), organism, and at least in principle, population and species.
Stars and galaxies formed back in the early days of the universe, some 13 billion years ago, were not nearly as massive as originally thought.
Population III stars were not only smaller than believed, they actually formed in binary systems, that is, pairs of stars that orbit a common center, say the results of a new simulation.
"For a long time the common wisdom was that these Population III stars formed alone," said Brian O'Shea, a Michigan State University assistant professor of physics and astronomy who did the research with two colleagues. "Researchers also have believed that these stars were incredibly massive – up to 300 times the size of our own sun. Unfortunately, the observations just didn't jibe with the simulations we created."
For a baseball pitcher, control is critical but shoulder strength remains vital to remaining healthy during a long season. A new study presented at the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine's (AOSSM) Annual Meeting in Keystone, Colorado, suggested that testing a pitcher's shoulder strength through a series of exercises during the preseason may help prevent serious injury during the season.
The study measured the preseason shoulder strength for all pitchers in a professional baseball organization over a five-year period (2001-2005). Over the course of the five-year period, 144 major and minor league baseball pitchers were analyzed using a specific protocol by a single athletic trainer.
The National Children's Study is an ideal opportunity to get valuable information about pregnant women's health, the most underrepresented population in clinical research, say ethicists at Duke University Medical Center, Johns Hopkins and Georgetown Universities.
The new national study aims to follow children from conception to adulthood.
Although the Institute of Medicine began recommending that pregnant women be included in clinical trials 15 years ago, pregnant women remain excluded from trials for many reasons, primarily ethical concerns raised in the balance between mothers, a consenting group, and babies who have no choice.
