Scientists from Imperial College London and the University of Edinburgh say they have shown that tiny crystals found inside bacteria provide a magnetic compass to help them navigate through sediment to find the best food and it provides fresh clues to explain biomagnetism – a phenomenon in which some birds, insects and marine life navigate using the magnetic field that encompasses the Earth.
Researchers say their study, published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, focuses on
magnetotactic bacteria, which contain chains of magnetic crystals, called magnetosomes. They exist all over the globe, living in lake and pond sediments and in ocean coastal regions.
Today you wake up and realize that Christmas is fast approaching, a little more than a week away, and you haven't done ANY shopping for gifts. Now that you realize that Christmas looming in your very near future, you are tempted to get the usual bath spa set for mom and golf tie for dad, but here are some helpful suggestions for some gifts that are convenient, eco-friendly and just plain cool. Just follow these simple steps to complete your successful shopping venture and avoid the stress of last minute shopping at the stores.
Step 1: Don't Panic
Step 2: Take deep breaths
Step 3: Get on the internet
Found in the nearby Large Magellanic Cloud, 30 Doradus is one of the largest massive star forming regions close to the Milky Way. Enormous stars in 30 Doradus, also known as the Tarantula Nebula, are producing intense radiation and searing winds of multimillion-degree gas that carve out gigantic bubbles in the surrounding cooler gas and dust.
Other massive stars have raced through their evolution and exploded catastrophically as supernovae, expanding these bubbles into X-ray- brightened superbubbles. They leave behind pulsars as beacons of their former lives and expanding supernova remnants that trigger the collapse of giant clouds of dust and gas to form new generations of stars.
On its opening day, the London Millennium Bridge experienced unexpected swaying due to the large number of people crossing it. A new study finally explains the Millennium Bridge 'wobble' by concluding that humans did not walk the way engineers would have preferred.
It has generally been thought the Millennium Bridge 'wobble' was due to pedestrians synchronizing their footsteps with the bridge motion. However, this is not supported by measurements of the phenomenon on other bridges.
"This article says most people die in bed. I figure if I stay out of bed, I'm safe." - Get Shorty
A map of natural hazard mortality in the United States has been produced and is featured in the International Journal of Health Geographics. It gives a county-level representation of the likelihood of dying as the result of natural events such as floods, earthquakes or extreme weather.
Dinosaur hunters on a month-long expedition to the Sahara desert have returned home in time for Christmas with more than they ever dreamed of finding.
They have unearthed not one but two possible new species of extinct animals. Their success marks one of the most exciting discoveries to come out of Africa for 50 years.
The team have discovered what appears to be a new type of pterosaur and a previously unknown sauropod, a species of giant plant-eating dinosaur. Both would have lived almost one hundred million years ago.
The findings of the world's largest study on the ability of children and young people to taste and what they like have now been published jointly by Danish Science Communication and food scientists from The Faculty of Life Sciences (LIFE) at University of Copenhagen. The subjects were 8,900 Danish schoolchildren.
The short version:
- Girls have a better sense of taste than boys
- Every third child of school age prefers soft drinks which are not sweet
- Children and young people love fish
- Kids do not think of themselves as being fussy eaters
- Boys have a sweeter tooth than girls
... and this all changes when they become teenagers.
If changing the batteries in the remote control or smoke detector seems like a chore, imagine having to change hundreds of batteries in sensors scattered across a busy bridge. That's why Kansas State University engineers are helping a semiconductor manufacturer implement its idea of an energy-harvesting radio. It could transmit important data -- like stress measurements on a bridge, for instance -- without needing a change of batteries, ever.
Bill Kuhn, K-State professor of electrical and computer engineering, and Xiaohu Zhang, master's student in electrical engineering, are developing an energy-harvesting radio for Peregrine Semiconductor, a San Diego-based integrated circuit manufacturer.
Black holes? Maybe we should think of them as donut holes. The shape of material around black holes has been seen for the first time: an analysis of over 200 active galactic nuclei—cores of galaxies powered by disks of hot material feeding a super-massive black hole—shows that all have a consistent, ordered physical structure that seems to be independent of the black hole's size.
During launch into orbit, a satellite is exposed to a number of extreme stresses. At takeoff the extremely strong engine vibrations are transmitted via the launcher structure to the satellite, which is also exposed to a high-intensity sound levels (140 dB and more). The increasing speed of the of the rocket also leads to aerodynamic strains that turn into a shockwave when the launch vehicle's velocity jumps from subsonic to supersonic.
That's not all. When the burned out rocket stages are blasted off and the next stage is fired up, the satellite is exposed to temporary impulsive vibrations. So how does the satellite survive earthquake-like vibrations, the forces of supersonic shock waves and the pressures of explosive blasts?
