When the federal government issues a terrorist warning, presidential approval ratings jump, a Cornell University sociologist finds. Interestingly, terrorist warnings also boost support for the president on issues that are largely irrelevant to terrorism, such as his handling of the economy.
Researchers have found that a human olfactory receptor protein previously shown to act in sperm, where it appears to help guide sperm to the egg during fertilization, is also expressed in human olfactory tissues in the nose and functions in our sense of smell. This remarkable dual capacity marks a functional range previously unknown for mammalian olfactory receptor proteins.
Tech savvy criminals are just as likely as anyone else to use high-tech devices, such as personal digital assistants, to help keep track of their activities. PDAs are relatively inexpensive and highly portable and can store documents, spreadsheets, databases and many other resources usually associated with a laptop or desktop computer. When these devices are used in a crime, law enforcement investigators need to know how to find, properly retrieve and examine the information they store, even if the criminal tried to hide or delete the data.
What happens to painkillers, antibiotics and other medicines after their work is done, and they end up in the wastewater stream? The National Institute of Standards and Technology is using laboratory experiments to help answer this question by studying what happens to pharmaceuticals when they react with chlorine–a disinfectant commonly used in wastewater treatment.
A new study finds that when young adults are served larger portions from one week to the next they overeat by almost 40 percent. Eating larger portions over time could account for the growth of the American girth over the past 20 years, the researchers say. “The more food we served to the college-student volunteers in our eating study, the more they ate… Since we know that restaurants are serving larger and larger food portions, we think that larger portions could be a major factor responsible for the increase in overweight and obesity that is so evident today.”
Scientists may be learning why it’s so hard to stop the cycle of violence. The answer may lie in the nervous system. There appears to be a fast, mutual, positive feedback loop between stress hormones and a brain-based aggression-control center in rats, whose neurophysiology is similar to ours. It may explain why, under stress, humans are so quick to lash out and find it hard to cool down.
Iceland.
This is an overview about Plate Tectonics and Fusion. These phenomena are related! It seems a long time ago, an inventor or scientist was experimenting with heat and trying to get energy with it. The heating chamber he was working on exploded and killed all life on Earth.
I came to this conclusion after researching continental drift, now called Plate Tectonics Theory. It started with the first article “How Continents break up” in a Scientific American magazine. In this magazine the authors stated that the breakup of the continents that formed the Mid-Atlantic Ridge,”…must be taken to have happened instantaneously along a line; a most unlikely event.”4 This statement struck me as unusual. I then noticed at the top of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, is the island called Iceland. It seems that Iceland has a head, two arms and a body. It reminded me of a cartoon character’s outline in a wall that the cartoon character just ran through!
Government researchers have used artificial neural networks and DNA microarrays to successfully predict the clinical outcome of patients diagnosed with neuroblastoma. The ANNs also identified a minimal set of 19 genes whose expression levels were closely associated with this clinical outcome. Currently, physicians stratify patients with neuroblastoma into high-, intermediate- and low-risk groups based on several factors. However, while stratification can guide patient treatment, it is not a predictor of survival. Now, the predictive power of microarray gene expression analysis coupled with ANNs could assist physicians in the treatment of individual patients.
Computer models of Earth’s climate have consistently linked long-term, high-magnitude variations in solar output to past climate changes. Now a closer look at earlier studies of the Sun casts doubt on evidence of such cycles of brightness, their intensity and their possible influence on Earth’s climate. The findings, by a solar physicist and two climate scientists funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), appear in the October 1 issue of the journal Science.
There are no gears or levers involved, nor even, for those who remember such things, punch cards transported in oblong boxes. Yet research by a Boston University does update a decidedly “old” technology in a bid to build better, faster data storage systems for today’s computers. They have carved tiny switches out of silicon, fabricating mechanical switches that are thousands of times smaller than a human hair.
Intense traumatic events, such as maternal separation, occurring early in the life of an infant may weaken its immune system, making it more susceptible to viral infections later in life that could trigger multiple sclerosis, new research reveals.
The research shows that exposure to prolonged maternal separation during the first two weeks of life altered immune, endocrine and behavioral responses to acute ”Theiler’s virus” infection in mice.
The amount of smoke in just one or two puffs of a cigarette can cause breaks in DNA and defects to a cell’s chromosomes, leading to irreversible changes in genetic information being passed to a newly divided cell, according to new research. Their findings are the first to show that cigarette smoke causes chromosome instability.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) reported on Sept. 17 that it has done additional analysis of the wind “loads” that the World Trade Center (WTC) towers were originally designed to resist–critical data to help the agency better assess the overall strengths and baseline performance of the two buildings before they were brought down by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The work is being conducted as part of NIST’s federal building and fire safety investigation of the WTC disaster.
Chinese who are exposed to smoky coal emissions from cooking and heating their homes may carry genetic mutations that greatly increase their risk of developing lung cancer. “Lung cancer mortality rates in Xuan Wei are among the highest in China in both nonsmoking women and men who smoke, and are associated with exposure to indoor emissions from the burning of smoky coal,” said the study’s lead researcher. “To account for the high rates of disease within this region, we tested for mutations generally associated with lung cancer in people who had no evidence of disease. We found that a good number of these individuals had mutations that indicated they were at higher risk for developing lung cancer in the future.”