Research conducted by Wayne Hochwarter, a professor of management in FSU’s College of Business, documents that Americans’ work attitudes have been affected as the cost to fill a tank of gas has nearly doubled over the past few years. In his research, approximately 1,000 full-time employees were asked to note how gas prices have affected their disposable spending patterns. They also were asked how these changes affected their stress levels and willingness to participate at work.

The Encyclopedia of Life project will detail 1.8 million known plant and animal species in the format of an online archive. Each species will have its own page with descriptions, photographs, videos, and maps, compiled by experts.

It is hoped that the $100m USD (£50m GBP) archive will be complete in 10 years and that in addition to an educational tool, the archive will have value for conservation efforts.

With a nod to one of nature's best surface chemists—an obscure desert beetle—polymer scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have devised a convenient way to construct test surfaces with a variable affinity for water, so that the same surface can range from superhydrophilic to superhydrophobic, and everything in between.

When repairing severed or damaged motor nerves with a donor nerve graft, surgeons have traditionally used a sensory nerve from another area of the patient's body. However, these patients often do not fully regain function in the injured area.

But now a team of surgeons at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Barnes-Jewish Hospital has found that repairing a motor nerve in rats with an intact motor nerve yields better results than using a sensory nerve. The research appeared in the March issue of the journal Microsurgery.

Some states spend as little as $35 per person each year on home- and community-based services for seniors, while other states spend more than $1,300 per person annually, according to previous research.

Regardless of how much was spent on home- and community-based services, the researchers found that doubling states' spending on services would reduce the risk of nursing home admission among childless seniors by 35 percent. Seniors who do not have children to help care for them are less likely to have to go into a nursing home if they live in a state that spends more on home- and community- based services, researchers have found.

Thousands of men facing surgical removal of the prostate due to cancer may someday have one less thing to worry about: post-surgical urinary incontinence.

That's because a team of expert urologic surgeons at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center has devised a simple, effective means of reconstructing key anatomical structures that ensure continence.

What I find most exciting about basic molecular biology today is the prospect of building a quantitative understanding of how a cell works. Many other scientists are excited about this as well, leading to the current popularity of what's being called 'systems biology.' The idea is that maybe we can understand the design principles behind a cellular process - how the behavior of a cell emerges from all of those detailed physical interactions among proteins, nucleic acids and other components of the cell. If that sounds vague to you, well, that's because it is vague.

To download the 8 meter X 4 meter 900M resolution poster it is ony available through BitTorrent, the size is 3.89 GB and it can be downloaded here.

Smaller resolutions below.

The most detailed portraits ever of the Earth's land surface have been created with ESA's Envisat environmental satellite. The portraits are the first products produced as part of the ESA-initiated GlobCover project and are available online.

Bimonthly global composites for May to June 2005 and March to April 2006 can be accessed through a newly developed map server tool on ESA’s GlobCover website.

A research team, including Kent State Professor of Geology Dr. Joseph Ortiz, tracing the origin of the large carbon dioxide increase in Earth’s atmosphere at the end of the last ice age has detected two ancient "burps" that originated from the deepest parts of the southern ocean around Antarctica.

The new study showed carbon that had built up in the ocean over millennia was released in two big pulses at about 18,000 years ago and 13,000 years ago, says Dr. Thomas Marchitto of the University of Colorado at Boulder, who jointly led the study with colleague Dr. Scott Lehman.

Imagine being able to rapidly identify tiny biological molecules such as DNA and toxins using less than a drop of salt water in a system that can fit on a microchip.

In a paper appearing next week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,* the team proves for the first time that a single nanometer-scale pore in a thin membrane can be used to accurately detect and sort different-sized polymer chains (a model for biomolecules) that pass through or block the channel.

Graphic showing a lipid bilayer membrane (blue) with an alpha-hemolysin nanopore.