Comic books have warned us time and time again to keep villains away from radiation. It only makes them stronger. Researchers at University of Delaware have discovered that ultraviolet radiation from the sun increases the plant-destroying powers of the common reed, making it an invasive archnemesis to its wetland plant victims.
My grandfather had a special room in his cellar for the various presses and casks he used to make his notoriously mouth-wrenching red wine. I have friends whose microbrew apparatus takes up the entire spare bedroom of their house, like a permanently boozy-smelling houseguest. Accordingly, I thought that fermenting was best left to the hardcore hobbyists-- too complicated a pursuit for the average partly-stocked kitchen. Turns out, it's pretty simple. I recently made ginger ale with only items I had laying around my kitchen.
The universe is a lazy place. If a system of particles can find a way exist in a lower-energy state, you’d better believe that the system will seek it out. A group of researchers from Amherst and Berkeley are capitalizing on this universal tendency toward calculated sloth by using self-assembly to create denser storage media.
A team of biomechanical and paleontological researchers at University of Manchester are exploring a question that teenaged dinosaur girls have wondered for years: how thin should a dinosaur model be?Karl Bates and his team built their supermodels using a framework reconstructed from museum-installed skeletons, using an infrared laser scanning technique called LiDAR.
Thanks to advances in satellite technology, college students are giving government intelligence a run for its money. A student geography project from UCLA made waves in the Harvard International review for using principles of wildlife diversity to narrow bin Laden’s likely location to a few promising structures in Pakistan. Bin Laden has everything in common with a member of a species trying to escape extinction. This allowed the UCLA students used theories of wildlife dispersion to predict his whereabouts.
The Archaeopteryx is experiencing a phoenix-like reascent to fossil celebrity status. The disovery of this clearly birdlike dinosaur in 1861 lent ethos to Darwin’s brand new Theory of Evolution. In December, the Thermopolis, WY archaeopteryx fossil was escorted to the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource laboratory for synchrotron X-ray analysis. According to researcher Uwe Bergmann, "What you normally can't see are the chemical elements from the original organism that might still be present in the fossil. Using X-ray fluorescence imaging, we can bring these elements to light, getting a better look at the fossil and learning more about the original animal.”
"When people live where the weather is colder and they are more covered with clothing, they depend on their diet for their vitamin D," reports Raymond Hobbs, MD. Dr. Hobbs’ study in the January/February issue of Endocrine Practice reveals that Detroit-area Arab-American women who wear the hijab, modest dress with headscarf, receive approximately half of the vitamin D of their western-dressed Arab-American neighbors.
I recently spoke to biological anthropologist Dr. Helen Fisher about her groundbreaking work on the chemical basis of our personality and its influence on who we fall in love with. As it turns out, science can shed a lot of light on a topic previously dominated by doubt, horoscopes, and what our mama told us. “So have you read the book?” asked Fisher. “What ‘type’ are you?” “Explorer/Negotiator. Are you sizing me up according to my ‘type’ now?” I teased.
If Google is hoarding all of the information in the world, I want in on some of it. Lured by the siren song of the new ocean features in Google Earth 5, I took the plunge. Embarked upon my maiden voyage. Threw myself in with the sharks. Ran out of sea cliches. Downloaded Google 5 in all of its beta-riffic glory.
Oral medication is convenient, but its specificity is lousy. Your stomach gets a concentrated dose of every pill you take, and the rest of it gets dispersed where your stomach sees fit. Even the treatment of the subsequent organs in the digestive tract requires a means to sidestep the stomach. A notable feature of the gastrointestinal tract is its well-defined acidity gradient, starting in the harsh stomach and steadily tapering toward neutral in the colon. By creating a polymer that automatically responds to acidity, researchers are develop drug delivery methods that passively target specific locations in the GI tract.
It seems that a new study is always uncovering new health benefits of hot peppers. Garnering a high-profile endorsement from Hillary Clinton as well as doctors and scientists, peppers' heat producing chemical capsaicin has been linked to benefits ranging from anti-inflammatory properties to cancer killing. Though capsaicin is beneficial to humans, packing heat isn't a cure-all for the peppers themselves. A recent study busted the myth that hotter peppers are more resistant to Phytopthora blight.
Nanotubes are often regarded as a precursor to nanocircuitry. A group at UC San Diego has found that they work pretty well for transferring biological information, too. Oh, et al. showed that selective differentiation of stem cells into bone cells could be achieved on titanium nanowires of approximately 70-100 nanometers in diameter. Using smaller nanowires caused less selectivity and slower differentiation. This suggests that the shape of the nanowires provided a signal to metamorphose into bone cells.
Better keep that resolution to hit the gym - you don't want to end up like an astronaut. A recent study by Joyce Keyak of UCIrvine suggests that the bones of astronauts lose up to 30% of their hipbone strength, comparable losses caused by osteoporosis in the elderly.
