May 11 2010

Laser Mapping

and has no comments yet.
Lasers, nasty space weapon or another tool? Equipped with a laser system, a plane collected highly precise images of New York city, its rooftops, trees, wetlands and much of what lies in between. In only four days, a twin engine aircraft equipped with an advanced version of lidar (light detection and ranging) flew back and forth over the jungle of Belize and collected data surpassing the results of decades of torturous ground mapping. After three weeks of laboratory processing, the almost 10 hours of laser measurements showed topographic detail over an area of 80 square miles, notably settlement patterns of grand architecture and modest house mounds, roadways and agricultural terrace. Such a tool can quickly measure environmental areas of concern as well as urban areas.
Categories: News
May 10 2010

Gaining Weight and Having Type 2 Diabetes

and has no comments yet.
Have you ever wondered how can you possibly gain so much weight when somebody else eats even more and gains less? Obviously, some of the answer is how much exercise one does. Another part of the answer is shown in the first study of its type by Australian researchers. Healthy people with a genetic predisposition to Type 2 diabetes gain more weight overeating over the short term than their non-genetically prone counterparts.
Categories: News
May 07 2010

The Neanderthal in You

and has no comments yet.
Whatever happened to Neanderthal man and woman? Where did they go? After extracting ancient DNA from the 40,000 year old bones of Neanderthals, scientists have obtained a draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome, yielding important new insights into the evolution of modern humans. Among the findings, published in the May 7 issue of Science, is evidence that shortly after early modern humans migrated out of Africa, some of them interbred with Neanderthals, leaving bits of Neanderthal DNA sequences scattered through the genomes of present day non-Africans.
Categories: News
May 06 2010

Environmental Cancer Risk

and has no comments yet.
There is a body of evidence linking general environmental exposures to cancer. A report was released today by the President's Cancer Panel which finds that the true burden of environmentally induced cancer is underestimated. The Panel's report, "Reducing Environmental Cancer Risk: What We Can Do Now," concludes that while environmental exposure is not a new front on the war on cancer, the harm from this group of carcinogens has not been addressed adequately by the National Cancer Program.
Categories: News
May 05 2010

How Cold Can It Go?

and has no comments yet.
Here we are in global warming but there are still places that can be outright cold. Antarctica, of course, comes to mind as well as Siberia. The lowest recorded air temperature on Earth was a measurement of −89.2C (-128.6 F) made at Vostok station, Antarctica, at 0245 UT on 21 July 1983. What could have caused it? What sort of freak weather pattern made it so frigid?
Categories: News
May 04 2010

Mount St. Helens’ Aftermath

and has no comments yet.
A volcano erupts and the world seems to end. What happens afterwards? May 18 marks the 30th anniversary of the eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington state and scientists to this day use what's being learned there to challenge established thinking about how landscapes evolve and rebound.
Categories: News
1 … 53 54 55