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3/15/10
| News
Calculations are fine, but seeing is believing. That's the thought behind a new paper by Rice Univ. students who decided to put to the test calculations made more than a century ago.
Mar 11 | News
An analysis of more than 70,000 galaxies by physicists in the U.S. and Switzerland demonstrates that the universe—at least up to a distance of 3.5 billion light years from Earth—plays by the rules set out 95 years ago by Albert Einstein in his General Theory of Relativity.
Mar 10 | News
Ancient tropical rocks that now reside in the remote northern reaches of Canada tell the tale: about 716.5 million years ago the Earth lay bound in a layer of ice that limited life to eukaryotes. Strangely, this glaciation—history’s most extensive at 5 million years, say researchers at NSF and Harvard—occurred at about the same time that animals appear in the fossil record.
11 hours ago | News
In the effort to study the movements of bacteria, Texas A&M plant experts observed the cell wall crashing behavior of Xylella fastidiosa, which causes a deadly wine grape plant disease. Electron microscopy helped them see this movement for the first time.
12 hours ago | News
Images from the recent flyby of Phobos—a proposed landing for an upcoming mission—were captured on the rarely seen “dark side” of the Martian moon thanks to the highly elliptical orbit of the Mars Express that takes outside the moon’s path. The images were also taken as part of the High Resolution Stereo Camera experiment.
12 hours ago | News
Forensic scientists may soon have a valuable new item in their toolkits—a way to identify individuals using unique, telltale types of hand bacteria left behind on objects like keyboards and computer mice, says a new Univ. of Colorado at Boulder study.
13 hours ago | News
Magic bullets, also called silver bullets, because of the folkloric belief that only silver bullets can kill supernatural creatures, remain the goal of drug development efforts today. A team of scientists at Washington Univ. in St. Louis is currently working on a magic bullet for cancer. But their bullets are gold rather than silver.
13 hours ago | News
The film "Avatar" isn't the only 3-D blockbuster making a splash this winter. A team of scientists from Houston's Texas Medical Center this week unveiled a new technique for growing 3-D cell cultures, a technological leap from the flat petri dish that could save millions of dollars in drug-testing costs.
14 hours ago | News
The features on computer chips are getting so small that soon the process used to make them, which has hardly changed in the last 50 years, won’t work anymore. One of the alternatives that academic researchers have been exploring is to create tiny circuits using molecules that automatically arrange themselves into useful patterns.
Mar 15 | RDBlog
The recent review of the past 10 years of the National Nanotechnology Initiative--as presented by the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology--suggested the rise of nanomanufacturing as the near future of nanotechnology. But the actual proposed funding reflects a cautious approach, even about nanotech in general.
Mar 15 | News
Lithium-ion battery anodes are made from graphite. Silicon anodes would offer a ten-fold improvement, but ion travel quickly destroys the material. A new experimental silicon-carbon nanocomposite, built through self-assembly, solves the degradation problem.
Mar 15 | News
Developed with funding from the DOE's Clean Coal Power Initiative, a new DryFining technology from NETL uses waste heat from a power plant to reduce moisture content in lignite coal and also segregates particles by density. Occurring before oxidation, this sorting process eliminates many higher density compounds like sulfur and mercury and allows greater energy extraction and lower harmful emissions.