science

The New Ipod Nano: A Masterpiece Gadgets have taken the world by storm, so whether it?s a Dell Laptop or a Blackberry or an Apple MacBook or iPod , the youth are hooked to them. I recently visited a friend?s place and found that he had recently bought a new iPod Nano fifth Generation. This iPod officially known as Apple iPod Nano Fifth Generation Red 16GB is truly a masterpiece. It is available in two variants, the 8GB and the 16GB one. The higher variant can hold up to 4000 songs and 14, 000 iPod viewable photographs, not to mention 16 hours of video5. It can also store data via a USB flash drive. As compared to other earlier versions and other mp3 players, it is very light-weighted and weighs only 36.4 grams. Some of the other new features include a spoken menu that allows users to hear songs, artists among things without having to look at the screen. Different font sizes are available too and a high resolution LCD makes it easier to read in low light. Videos can also have captions displayed with them. The display
Post Date:02/01/2010 05:14:06
theviewspaper.net

Chemical Exposure Linked to Attention Deficit Disorder in Children Children exposed in the womb to chemicals in cosmetics and fragrances are more likely to develop behavioral problems commonly found in children with attention deficit disorders, according to a study of New York City school-age children published Thursday. [More]
Post Date:01/29/2010 09:30:00
rss.sciam.com

The space shuttle's 2009 mission to Hubble: Coming soon to a theater near you NEW YORK--Back in May 2009 two of the most iconic entities in space science and exploration came together--literally--in the final scheduled servicing mission of the space shuttle to the Hubble Space Telescope. The astronauts of space shuttle Atlantis plucked Hubble from orbit and in the course of five spacewalks dramatically revitalized the 19-year-old observatory, which had been limping along for some time. [More]
Post Date:01/29/2010 09:00:00
rss.sciam.com

Is Water Vapor in the Stratosphere Slowing Global Warming? Earth's stratosphere is a cold, dry place, above the troposphere--the bottom layer of the atmosphere we breathe on a daily basis. Ruled by winds and hosting everything from bacteria to long-distance jet travel, about the only way that water gets into this high-altitude layer 10 kilometers above the Earth's surface is when it billows up from the humid tropics, rising from the troposphere via the atmospheric interface known as the tropopause. But since 2001 there has been less water vapor in a narrow, lower band of the stratosphere thanks to cooler temperatures in the tropopause, and that may just be holding back global warming at ground level, according to new research published online in Science on January 28. [More]
Post Date:01/29/2010 08:00:00
rss.sciam.com

Asexual Solution to a Parasite Problem Organisms evolved sexual reproduction so they could stay one step ahead of parasites. Or so the theory goes. But what about beasties that make babies without sex? How do they escape infection? A study in the journal Science suggests that for bdelloid rotifers, the answer is blowin’ in the wind. [More]
Post Date:01/29/2010 06:57:08
rss.sciam.com

Poisoned Shipments: Are Strange, Illicit Sinkings Making the Mediterranean Toxic? In October 2009 the government of Italy announced that a wreck discovered off the southwestern tip of the country is the Catania , a passenger vessel sunk during World War I--and not the Cunski , a cargo ship loaded with radioactive waste, as alleged by district authorities from nearby Calabria. Few locals are reassured, says Michael Leonardi of the University of Calabria. He and others maintain that the putative Cunski is still out there and is just one of numerous ships full of poisonous garbage that a crime syndicate has scuttled in the Mediterranean Sea. Such a startling allegation, if true, would not only damage the tourism and fishing industries along this idyllic coast but also compromise the health of Mediterranean residents.Processing and safely storing waste from the chemical, pharmaceutical and other industries can cost hundreds, even thousands, of dollars per ton--which makes illegal disposal highly profitable. According to the Italian environmental organization Legambi
Post Date:01/29/2010 06:00:00
rss.sciam.com

Have Wallet Cards Helped Fish? Americans eat more fish than ever. We now gobble up more than two million tons of seafood a year compared to just half a million at the dawn of the 20th century. Not only are there more of us, we're also eating more fish--globally.   That's led to a global collapse of many fisheries , such as cod in the North Atlantic. To help forestall this ecological catastrophe a variety of sustainable-seafood certification schemes have emerged. And the Monterey Bay Aquarium released its first seafood wallet card in 2000.   [More]
Post Date:01/28/2010 15:00:08
rss.sciam.com

New large-clawed Jurassic dinosaur sheds light on elusive lineage The dinosaur group that over the eons has brought us Tyrannosaurus rex and modern birds just got a new member in one of its more perplexing, birdlike families, the alvarezsauridae. [More]
Post Date:01/28/2010 12:30:00
rss.sciam.com

Sewer or Septic?: When It Comes to Sewage, Most People Prefer to Share the Burden Dear EarthTalk: What’s better for the local ecology, sewers or septic tanks? --T. H., Darien, Conn. [More]
Post Date:01/28/2010 11:00:00
rss.sciam.com

Sex Differences in Jealousy Studies from around the world have reported that men are more jealous of sexual infidelity than emotional infidelity. And women are the opposite--they’re more jealous of emotional cheating than sexual cheating. Experts often lean on an evolutionary cause for this gender difference: Men can never be sure they are the baby-daddy and women are most concerned with securing a genuinely loyal father to care for the children.Well, authors of a recent study in Psychological Science question the strength of the evolutionary just-so theory--realizing that there are men who find emotional cheating far worse than sexual cheating. The study reports that personality patterns, shaped by one’s relationship history, can have an impact on jealousy. [More]
Post Date:01/28/2010 08:00:08
rss.sciam.com

Jumping Neural DNA Key to Brain Plasticity? In high school biology you probably learned that every one of our body’s cells contains the same genome, or pattern of DNA--but it turns out that this is not true of the brain. Researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies recently found that the DNA sequence in human neurons can vary not only from that of the rest of the body but even from one brain cell to the next.The reason is “jumping genes,” DNA elements that can copy and reinsert themselves in different places within the genome. These mutations increase the total amount of DNA in each neuron. Geneticist Fred H. Gage and his team at Salk looked at a type of mobile element called LINE-1. Although LINE-1s are present in all cells of the body, they appeared to be active only in developing brain cells, the researchers found. [More]
Post Date:01/28/2010 07:00:00
rss.sciam.com

Negating "Climategate": Copenhagen Talks and Climate Science Survive Stolen E-Mail Controversy Copenhagen--Even under this city’s low, leaden skies, at least one thing remained clear as leaders from 193 countries gathered to negotiate climate agreements: one ton of carbon dioxide emitted in the U.S. has the same effect as one ton emitted in India or anywhere else. That simple truism is part of a huge body of data pointing to humanity’s effect on climate, and for most negotiators, the weight of that evidence seems to have crushed any doubt they may have felt in the wake of the 1,000-plus e-mails and computer code stolen from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU).The theft made headlines as “Climategate” in November, and many private correspondences among scientists became public. Climate contrarians and politicians, including Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, have claimed that the messages show that climate science was far from settled, that “tricks” were used and that researchers hid unfavorable data. [More]
Post Date:01/28/2010 06:00:00
rss.sciam.com

Forcing Electrons into Superconducting Line Imagine a world with levitating cars, MRIs the size of laptops, and wide scale efficient energy distribution. These might not be pipe dreams if scientists can capitalize on a finding in the journal Nature . [More]
Post Date:01/28/2010 05:55:08
rss.sciam.com

Colorizing Dinosaurs: Feather Pigments Reveal Appearance of Extinct Animals For nearly two centuries, people have struggled to imagine what the great extinct dinosaurs looked like. Thanks to modern paleontology and physiology, their shapes, masses and even how they might have moved and interacted have been deduced. But one of the most basic questions about their appearance, their coloring, seemed unanswerable. [More]
Post Date:01/27/2010 15:50:00
rss.sciam.com

Eclipse Photograph Exposes Details of Both Sun and Moon [More]
Post Date:01/27/2010 15:20:00
rss.sciam.com

Running barefoot is better, researchers find Mother Nature has outpaced science once again: the bare human foot is better for running than one cushioned by sneakers. What about those $125 high-tech running shoes with 648 custom combinations? Toss 'em, according to a new study published online January 27 in the journal Nature ( Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group). [More]
Post Date:01/27/2010 13:25:00
rss.sciam.com

You'll Go Blind: Does Watching Television Close-Up Really Harm Eyesight? Dear EarthTalk: Years ago I read that children should be kept at least two feet from the television because of harmful electronic emissions. Is this still relevant? Is there a difference regarding this between older and new flat-screen models? --Horst E. Mehring, Oconomowoc, Wisc. [More]
Post Date:01/27/2010 11:00:00
rss.sciam.com

The Barefoot Professor Harvard professor Daniel Lieberman has ditched his trainers and started running barefoot. His research shows that barefoot runners, who tend to land on their fore-foot, generate less impact shock than runners in sports shoes who land heel first.
Post Date:01/27/2010 10:18:51
rss.sciam.com

Listening While Driving Is, What'd Ya Say? We all know that talking on a cell phone can impair our ability to drive (although too many of us do it anyway). Now a study in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin and Review shows that the reverse is also true: driving makes it hard to keep track of what we’re talking about.Previous studies had found that motorists are able to converse just fine. But to Gary Dell of the University of Illinois that finding just didn’t make sense. Because comprehending speech requires attention, as does steering the family sedan. So Dell did a study in a driving simulator. [More]
Post Date:01/27/2010 08:33:08
rss.sciam.com

L'UTLS et l'ing L'Universit
Post Date:01/12/2010 02:49:00
huguettelesbonstuyaux.20minutes-blogs.fr