Science News

• share
• favorite_border

The ANSER Institute for Homeland Security supports development and implementation of a national strategy for ensuring the security of our American homeland.

• share
• favorite_border

Inspired by science fiction classics, NASA scientists are building a talking, thinking and flying robot to help astronauts with their chores in space.

• share
• favorite_border

The California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, a partnership between UC San Diego and UC Irvine, has signed up a new industrial partner: Enosys Markets, a San Diego-based software firm.

• share
• favorite_border

A new chemical analysis method that could have a dramatic effect on several fields ranging from drug discovery to deciphering the genetic code of humans has earned an R&D 100 Award for Ed Yeung, distinguished professor of chemistry at Iowa State University.

• share
• favorite_border

The National Center for Atmospheric Research announced that it will begin negotiations to purchase and modify a Gulfstream G-V aircraft for use in wide-ranging environmental research supported by the National Science Foundation. The $80M project includes aircraft modification and instrument development.

• share
• favorite_border

A gene discovered by scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill appears to be crucial for female embryo survival. The study furthers the understanding of a fundamental biological process in mammals.

• share
• favorite_border

On July 20, 1976, NASA's Viking 1 lander parachuted safely to the surface of Mars, revealing an alien world that continues to puzzle scientists and tempt explorers.

• share
• favorite_border

New kinds of instruments and experiments -- made possible with a just announced multi-million dollar award from the W.M. Keck Foundation of Los Angeles -- could give scientists ways to study the microbial life that flourishes where the seafloor twists and buckles.

• share
• favorite_border

On July 23, 2001, the American Type Culture Collection workshop program will be offering a one-day symposium entitled "Extremophile Research: Theory and Techniques".

• share
• favorite_border

Reading the geochemical fine print found in tiny crystals of the minerals zircon and quartz, scientists are forming a new picture of the life history - and a geologic timetable - of a type of volcano in the western United States capable of dramatically altering climate sometime within the next 100,000 years.

• share
• favorite_border

Biologists have discovered how plant cells resist some ailments. Researchers from Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research and Cornell University can now demonstrate how disease-causing organisms deliver destructive agents to plants, and how plants fight back.

• share
• favorite_border

In ancient times many people thought heavenly alignments influenced daily life on Earth. Nowadays we know that astrology has no predictive power.

• share
• favorite_border

Optical scientists at the University of Arizona are working under an agreement with The Egg Factory, LLC, and its subsidiary company, eVision, to develop a proprietary technology that within a few years could provide next-generation eyeglasses--glasses with lenses that actively focus so people can see clearly up close or far away.

• share
• favorite_border

Scientists have known for decades that Mars, at least in its ancient past, has had a considerable amount of water. But when Mars Global Surveyor began mapping the Red Planet in sharp detail early in 1999, it disclosed startling evidence that water has shaped martian landforms within the past 10 million years.

• share
• favorite_border

For the first time, teenage boys were invited to attend Camp Calcium on the Purdue University campus this summer, and 47 young males accepted the invitation. The camp gets its name because it is actually a research project studying osteoporosis, a bone disease that can be prevented by eating the proper amount of calcium during the teenage years.

• share
• favorite_border

Scientists and engineers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and their colleagues will use a new digital recording tag to study and assess the risk factors of vessel collisions with the endangered Northern right whale. Less than 300 of the whales remain.

• share
• favorite_border

A University of Tulsa geosciences professor will lead a scientific expedition July 31 to Oct. 3 to the Arctic, coming within 150 miles of the North Pole. He will be the chief scientist on the Healy, a 420-foot-long icebreaker. This will be the new ship's first scientific mission, which will focus on the mid-ocean ridge.

• share
• favorite_border

Kent State University and the Lerner Research Institute at The Cleveland Clinic Foundation have formed a major biomedical research and educational partnership that will expand the region's focused expertise in biotechnology-related research at a time when that technology is being recognized as a priority industry of the future in Ohio and the nation.

• share
• favorite_border

A University of Rhode Island researcher is using shredded wood in a new system for filtering out contaminants from storm water that runs off roadways.

• share
• favorite_border

There's a nine out of ten chance that global average temperatures will rise 3-9 degrees Fahrenheit over the coming century, with a 4-7 degree increase most likely, according to a new probability analysis by scientists in the United States and Europe.

• share
• favorite_border

A University of Illinois at Chicago biology professor is part of a team led by the Institute for Genomic Research in sequencing the complete genome of a virulent strain of pneumococcus.

• share
• favorite_border

The Public Affairs Executive Committee of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology has approved a policy statement in regards to cloning humans and legislation designed to regulate and/or prohibit such actions.

• share
• favorite_border

At a July 18 Senate hearing, Past FASEB President urged lawmakers to allow for federal funding of research involving stem cells.

• share
• favorite_border

• share
• favorite_border

Using a revolutionary computer program that gives scientists the opportunity to watch evolution take place before their eyes using "digital organisms," a team of researchers from Michigan State University and Caltech has confirmed an evolutionary process long suspected but, until now, unproven.

• share
• favorite_border

University of Utah biologists showed how a single protein plays an essential role in preparing nerve cells to release neurotransmitters -- the chemical signals necessary for humans and other animals to think, move, remember or do most other things.

• share
• favorite_border

Tampa Bay is one of the few areas in the world where amphioxus live and grow. Scientists come from around the world to study the organism's molecular biology, including factors that control development.

• share
• favorite_border

In Arkansas, farmers will check their fields for changes in moisture levels and forestry workers can examine forests for pest outbreaks with the click of a few buttons, thanks to new technology created by University of Arkansas researchers and housed on campus.

• share
• favorite_border

Indiana University researchers have shown how to identify tens of thousands of genes all at once by using tiny semiconductor crystals that dazzle in ultraviolet light.

• share
• favorite_border

A massive dust storm --the largest in 25 years and still growing-- has erupted on Mars. It's so big that amateur astronomers using modest telescopes can see it from Earth.

• share
• favorite_border

The E-Print Archive "arXiv.org," widely credited with revolutionizing the way physical scientists and mathematicians communicate, is moving from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico to Cornell University and will become a service of Cornell University Library.

• share
• favorite_border

The National Center for Atmospheric Research is one of the nation's leading institutions for climate change research and a National Science Foundation supercomputing center. NCAR staff scientists listed are experts in their respective fields of climate change.

• share
• favorite_border

Using statistical methods developed in climate forecasting research, scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, have constructed the first comprehensive forecast for wildfires in the western United States.

• share
• favorite_border

In the land of pharaohs and sphinxes, civil engineers from the University of Missouri-Rolla are trying to solve a new riddle: Why are some of Egypt's most treasured antiquities crumbling into dust?

• share
• favorite_border

In 1969, Peter Pulay wrote a paper that was to change permanently the way scientists study atoms and molecules, the basic matter of the universe. Today, his research continues with a $401,000 grant from the NSF.

• share
• favorite_border

A 10-foot-high, 13-foot-wide screen that makes high-definition television look as grainy as an old TV in a cheap motel has been unveiled by Sandia National Laboratories.

• share
• favorite_border

The National Science Foundation has named Judith A. Ramaley, a celebrated educational innovator and former president of two universities, as the Foundation's new Assistant Director for Education and Human Resources.

• share
• favorite_border

Astronomers have detected a massive cloud of water vapor around an aging star. It could be the telltale sign of innumerable dying comets -- and a glimpse of things to come in our own solar system.

• share
• favorite_border

Farmers in the Southeast can play a critical role in halting the population decline of bobwhite quail, and they can do it without facing a significant decrease in the profitability of their farms, a researcher at North Carolina State University says.

• share
• favorite_border

A NASA program will allow Colorado State University undergraduates to test proper use of a constant-force exercise machine in microgravity. The device could help astronauts avoid muscle and bone density loss on long postings to the International Space Station.

• share
• favorite_border

MetaPhore Pharmaceuticals announced that initial human clinical studies of the first candidate from its proprietary family of free-radical fighting enzyme mimetics have shown the drug to be safe and well tolerated.

• share
• favorite_border

A team of Brigham Young University researchers has created molecules that glow in the presence of certain metal pollutants, paving the way for an early warning system that can alert regulators to the contamination of drinking water and waste streams.

• share
• favorite_border

Salk scientists have created an animal model for autoimmune diseases that closely mirrors the perplexing patterns of symptoms observed in human autoimmunity, including an increased susceptibility of females over males.

• share
• favorite_border

Astronomers have discovered 12 more moons around Saturn. And they have evidence that these once were just three or four moons, minding their business, orbiting the planet like all regular saturnian moons do today.

• share
• favorite_border

Anthropologists have discovered the remains of the earliest known human ancestor in Ethiopia, dating to between 5.2 and 5.8 million years ago and which predate the previously oldest-known fossils by almost a million years.

• share
• favorite_border

1) Man's even better friend? 2) Two's a crowd 3) Tomboys are bred in the womb 4) Destined to divorce 5) And others

• share
• favorite_border

A new approach developed by scientists at the University of Michigan and ExxonMobil Upstream Research Company allows direct dating of faults--surfaces along which rocks break and move--near Earth's surface.

• share
• favorite_border

The remarkable hydrothermal vents discovered last December in the mid-Atlantic, including an 18-story vent taller than any seen before, are formed in a very different way than previously studied vents: Fluids are apparently driven by heat generated when seawater reacts with mantle rocks, not by volcanic heat.

• share
• favorite_border

Beginning Friday the 13th -- a lucky day for stargazers -- four planets, the Moon, and a giant red star will put on a dazzling show for early-rising sky watchers.

• share
• favorite_border

Important milestones in brain development across nine mammalian species, from hamsters to humans, have now been modeled, providing a key for translating from one species to another, Cornell neurobiologists report.