Parasitic plants do not haphazardly flail about looking for a host but sense volatile chemicals produced by other plants and identify potential hosts by their emissions, according to a team of Penn State chemical ecologists.
An egg-shaped fullerene, or “buckyball egg” has been made and characterized by chemists at UC Davis, Virginia Tech and Emory and Henry College, Va. The unexpected discovery opens new possibilities for structures for fullerenes, which could have a wide range of uses. “It was a total surprise,” said Christine Beavers, a chemistry graduate student working with Professors Alan Balch and Marilyn Olmstead at UC Davis. Beavers is first author on the paper, published this month in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
What if you had ADD 40 years ago but didn’t know it because the disease hadn’t been invented yet? Would you still be bouncing off the cubicle walls at work? Would you forget where you parked the car? Forget to deposit your paycheck? The answers may have to wait till we refocus.
The complete archive of The Royal Society journals, including some of the most significant scientific papers ever published since 1665, is to be made freely available electronically for the first time today (14th September 2006) for a two month period.
Transfer of a gene that produces a mutant form of good cholesterol provides significantly better anti-plaque and anti-inflammation benefits than therapy using the “normal” HDL gene, according to a mouse study conducted by cardiology researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and reported in the Oct. 3 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
Not so long ago, before electric lights, farmers relied on moonlight to harvest autumn crops. With everything ripening at once, there was too much to do to stop at sundown. A bright full moon—a “Harvest Moon”—allowed work to continue into the night. The moonlight was welcome, but as any farmer could tell you, it was strange stuff. How so? See for yourself. The Harvest Moon of 2006 rises on October 6th, and if you pay attention, you may notice a few puzzling things.
Researchers have determined that airbags and antilock braking systems do not reduce the likelihood of accidents or injuries because they may encourage more aggressive driving, thwarting the potential benefits of such safety features. The behavior responsible for this seeming paradox is called the offset hypotheses, which predicts that consumers adapt to innovations meant to improve safety by becoming less vigilant about safety, said Fred Mannering, a professor of civil engineering at Purdue University.
We CAN detect some of what is beyond our universe’s bubble. It involves understanding the relationship between dark energy and gravitation.
Scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Bar-Ilan University have discovered unusually high concentrations of silver in samples of many different types of pottery from excavations in Jerusalem of the late Second Temple period, the first century BCE (Before the Common Era) through 70 CE (Common Era). This is the first study ever conducted on silver in archaeological ceramics.
Jeffrey Schwartz, author of The Human Fossil Record, explained the problem is that “Lucy” and this child specimen (“Selam”) from Dikika have been placed in Australopithecus afarensis, which is not from Ethiopia but from Laetoli, a site in Tanzania thousands of kilometers to the south.
A Howard Hughes Medical Institute international research scholar in Israel has discovered one reason why so-called “flesh-eating” bacteria are so hard to stop.
New experimental research shows that half-matter, half-light quasi-particles called polaritons show compelling evidence of Bose-Einstein condensation at the relatively high temperature of 19 degrees Kelvin. The creation of a polariton Bose-Einstein condensate in the solid state provides scientists with a unique opportunity to better understand and possibly exploit the quantum effects that occur in these very special conditions.
Researchers have found for the first time that tarantulas can produce silk from their feet as well as their spinnerets, a discovery with profound implications for why spiders began to spin silk in the first place.
Laws that require minors to notify or get the consent of one or both parents before having an abortion reduce risky sexual behavior among teens, according to a Florida State University law professor in Tallahassee, Fla.
To say that the fruits of medical science are too expensive for most people to afford ignores the question of what’s really important.
Scientists at the University of Alaska Fairbanks International Arctic Research Center this fall documented that recent surges of warm water from the North Atlantic Ocean continue to pulse into the Arctic Ocean and are moving toward Alaska and the Canadian Basin.
Ocean temperature in the Arctic is important because it may affect the amount of sea ice in the region. Scientists believe that arctic sea ice cover plays a major role in the global climate, as ice reflects more of the sun’s heat than open water.
According to a study by researchers at National Development and Research Institutes, Inc. (NDRI) users of blunts (tobacco cigar shells filled with marijuana) do not understand or experience marijuana dependence in terms of conventional clinical criteria. Rather, they associate clinical symptoms with “harder” drugs such as heroin, crack, cocaine and nicotine. However, many suggested that blunts may have addictive potential because they contain tobacco (nicotine). This finding suggests that future studies on cannabis dependence should be designed to include blunts.
The phrase “easy on the eyes” may hit closer to the mark than we suspected. Experiments led by Piotr Winkielman, of the University of California, San Diego, and published in the current issue of Psychological Science, suggest that judgments of attractiveness depend on mental processing ease, or being “easy on the mind.”
