2007 October

Driving while under the influence of alcohol or drugs, or at excessive speeds are widely considered to be the main causes of serious accidents involving a single vehicle. However, a new in-depth on-scene study in Sweden reveals that driver fatigue, slippery roads, and inexperience could be just as important and should be factored into the […]

A new chemical spray detector developed by Prof. Joseph Almog of the Hebrew University’s Casali Institute of Applied Chemistry detects the home-made explosive urea nitrate. When sprayed on cotton swabs taken from the hands of a suspect, if they have had recent contact with urea nitrate, the chemical will turn a blood red hue.
Urea nitrate […]

The Wikimedia Foundation, an international nonprofit organization dedicated to the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, announced today that it will host Wikipedia Academy workshops in various locations throughout South Africa on November 10 and 11, 2007. Co-hosted by South Africa-based nonprofit organization, iCommons, the goal of the Wikipedia Academies is to stimulate […]

The sneakiest, creepiest surprise this Halloween may actually be in the candy dish. In a study being presented this Saturday at the American Heart Association conference in Orlando shows that people at only half as many mini-size Halloween candies when they kept the wrappers in plain sight The sneakiest, creepiest surprise this Halloween may actually […]

Most people in Africa and Asia are born and die without leaving a trace in any official records, giving policymakers and researchers little information on which to base public health decisions, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researcher and colleagues say in a paper published today (Oct. 29, 2007) in the British medical […]

The average price for all types of gasoline is holding steady around $2.95 per gallon nationwide, but the pain at the pump might be short-lived as research from the University of Houston may eliminate one of the biggest hurdles to the wide-scale production of fuel cell-powered vehicles.
Peter Strasser, an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular […]

Research to be reported October 29 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) provides evidence that some molecular interactions on cell surfaces may have a "memory" that affects their future interactions. The report could lead to a re-examination of results from certain single-molecule research.
Researchers who use sequentially repeated tests to obtain […]

A novel MIT study concludes that increasing levels of ozone due to the growing use of fossil fuels will damage global vegetation, resulting in serious costs to the world’s economy.
The analysis, reported in the November issue of Energy Policy, focused on how three environmental changes (increases in temperature, carbon dioxide and ozone) associated with human […]

Spending just ten minutes talking to another person can help improve your memory and your performance on tests, according to a University of Michigan study to be published in the February 2008 issue of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
"In our study, socializing was just as effective as more traditional kinds of mental exercise in […]

Researchers at the University of Manchester have developed high-tech battery-powered textile yarns that can be used to make clothing glow in the dark.
The yarns have been developed by The William Lee Innovation Centre (WLIC), based in the University’s School of Materials — and have the potential to be incorporated into clothing worn by cyclists, joggers […]

Researchers at New Mexico State University recently discovered the world’s hottest chile pepper. Bhut Jolokia, a variety of chile pepper originating in Assam, India, has earned Guiness World Records’ recognition as the world’s hottest chile pepper by blasting past the previous champion Red Savina. In replicated tests of Scoville heat units (SHUs), Bhut Jolokia reached […]

When will biofuels be at all local fuel pumps and from where will they come?
Researchers have been studying fuels from biomass for years. Now, with growing dependency on foreign oils and an energy-conscious society emerging, biofuels are fast becoming part of a fuel revolution that could reach pumps all across America.
Ethanol blends are already available […]

Lasers are at the cutting edge of surgery.
From cosmetic to brain surgery, intense beams of coherent light are gradually replacing the steel scalpel for many procedures.
Despite this increasing popularity, there is still a lot that scientists do not know about the ways in which laser light interacts with living tissue. Now, some of these basic […]

One new way to treat individuals with cancer that is being developed is the use of viruses that infect and kill cancer cells while leaving normal cells unharmed. These viruses are known as virotherapeutics. In a new study, David Kirn and colleagues at Jennerex Biotherapeutics, San Francisco, have described the development of a new virotherapuetic […]

Soils may dictate the array of fall colors as much as the trees rooted in them, according to a forest survey out of North Carolina.
By taking careful stock and laboratory analyses of the autumn foliage of sweetgum and red maple trees along transects from floodplains to ridge-tops in a nature preserve in Charlotte, N.C., former […]

Want to help unravel the mysteries of the universe" A new distributed computing project designed by a University of Illinois researcher allows people around the world to participate in cutting-edge cosmology research by donating their unused computing cycles.
The project is called Cosmology@Home, and is similar to SETI@Home, a popular program that searches radio telescope data […]

When it comes to their social behavior, people sometimes act like monkeys, or more specifically, like rhesus macaques, a type of monkey that shares with humans strong tendencies for nepotism and political maneuvering, according to research by Dario Maestripieri, an expert on primate behavior and an Associate Professor in Comparative Human Development and Evolutionary Biology […]

In the future, everyone who is connected to the electricity grid will be able to upload and download packages of electricity to and from this network. At least, that is one of the transformations the electricity grid could undergo. Dutch researcher Jos Meeuwsen (Technical University Eindhoven) developed three scenarios for the Dutch electricity supply in […]

Air pollution is becoming one of the biggest dangers for the future of the planet, causing premature deaths of humans and damaging flora and fauna. With their vantage point from space, satellites are the only way to carry out effective global measurements of air-polluting emissions and their transboundary movement.
Scientists and researchers from around the world […]

A split-second glance at two candidates’ faces is often enough to determine which one will win an election, according to a Princeton University study.
Princeton psychologist Alexander Todorov has demonstrated that quick facial judgments can accurately predict real-world election returns. Todorov has taken some of his previous research that showed that people unconsciously judge the competence […]