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Hofstadter's Butterfly Effect Confirmed
Hofstadter's Butterfly, a complex pattern of the energy states of electrons that resembles a butterfly, has appeared in physics textbooks as a theoretical concept of quantum mechanics for nearly 40 years but had never been directly observed - until now.
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US Government Updates Draft Rule For Hydraulic Fracturing On Public And Indian Lands
Following the release of an initial draft proposal in 2012, the Department of the Interior received over 177,000 public comments that helped shape today’s updated draft proposal. The new proposal maintainssafety standards, improves integration with existing state and tribal standards and increases flexibility for oil and gas developers. The updated draft proposal will be subject to a new 30-day public comment period.
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Reed Warbler, Who Be Your Daddy?
Depending on the species, males have different strategies to try and insure that they reproduce, rather than just being a step-parent.
They may try to ensure paternity by increased surveillance and fighting off the competition, they may have more frequent sex with their long-term partners, they may physically punish unfaithful females or refuse to parent potentially unrelated offspring.
Wilhelm Sinsteden - Inventor Of The Lead-Acid Battery
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The Diet Of The First New Zealanders
What was the diet and movements of the first New Zealanders like?
Isotopes from their bones and teeth can tell us. Researchers say they have been
able to identify what is likely to be the first group of people to colonize Marlborough's Wairau Bar, possibly from Polynesia around 700 years ago. They also present evidence suggesting that individuals from two other groups buried at the site had likely lived in different regions of New Zealand before being buried at Wairau Bar.
The researchers undertook isotopic analyses of samples recovered from the koiwi tangata (human remains) of the Rangitane iwi tupuna (ancestors) prior to their reburial at Wairau Bar in 2009.
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Karoo Array Telescope First Results: Giant Outbursts From Binary Star System Circinus X-1
The Karoo Array Telescope (KAT-7) in South Africa, the pathfinder radio telescope for the $3 billion global Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project, has released its first results.
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Drawing The Line With Congress
Higgs Decays To B-Quarks From CMS
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Galaxy 4C+29.30 - How A Supermassive Black Hole's Gravity Can Be Tapped To Generate Immense Power
4C+29.30, a galaxy located some 850 million light years from Earth, has a new composite image which shows how the intense gravity of a supermassive black hole can be tapped to generate immense power.
This multi-wavelength view reveals that the radio emission of 4C+29.30 comes from two jets of particles that are speeding at millions of miles per hour away from a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. The estimated mass of the black hole is about 100 million times the mass of our Sun. The ends of the jets show larger areas of radio emission located outside the galaxy.
There Is Scientific Consensus On Anthropogenic Climate Change Among Climate Scientists
An analysis of 4,000 abstracts of peer-reviewed articles on the topic of global warming and climate change has revealed an overwhelming consensus among climate scientists that recent warming is human-caused.
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Climate Change - Emotions Run High Among College Undergraduates Taking Surveys
There's no awareness issue in climate change - almost no one on the planet hasn't heard of it or lacks an opinion.
62% of Americans believe global warming is happening - which means 38% do not. Like evolution or anti-science beliefs about genetic modification and vaccines and autism, the majority may fall along particular cultural lines but acceptance is still a problem that defies easy categorization and stereotypes. Yet framing and deficit thinking have all been tried, and they have made the problem worse. Instead of leading to more science acceptance, opinion on the climate now goes up and down with media reports about the weather.
H1N1 In Elephant Seals: First Instance In Any Marine Mammal
H1N1 originated in pigs. It emerged in humans in 2009, spreading worldwide as a pandemic. The World Health Organization now considers the H1N1 strain from 2009 to be under control, taking on the behavior of a seasonal virus.
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Facial Recognition Tech Comes Of Age - $6.5 Billion By 2018
Over the past few years, demand from the surveillance market and huge spending by governments across the globe on biometric technologies has caused the facial recognition technology market to become more accurate, less costly and significantly more mainstream.
More accurate technology and the brighter economic future it can bring has led to more traction and investment from the commercial sector. The development of 3-D face recognition technology, backed by improved imaging solutions like middleware and fast analytics, has helped the technology to overcome its traditional flaws such as poor results in low lights, pose variation and image reconstruction
On Sea Level Rise, The IPCC Is Right - And That's Good For Us
That isn't really true. The actual IPCC is a tiny UN group, around a dozen people, but the bulk of the data is compiled by unpaid (well, unpaid by the UN) scientists who participate in working groups that argue over the science - it is not without some flaws. They use geographical and gender parameters for participation so a working group may not have the best scientists in the world, some will have been chosen because they needed to meet a cultural quota - and they still get to be heard.
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Warming In Central China - Clumped Isotope Thermometry Shows Previous Climate Models Were Off By A Lot
Temperatures in central China are 10 to 14 degrees Fahrenheit hotter today than they were 20,000 years ago - an increase two to four times greater than many scientists previously thought.
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Physical Strength And Political Conservatism Co-Evolved, Say Social Scientists
If you are physically strong, social science scholars believe they can predict whether or not you are more conservative than other men.
This might seem obvious. Fitness takes a lot of individual initiative, the government can do all of the outreach programs and legislate all of the soda cups they want, but it won't make people exercise. Super-fit people have to be conservative when it comes to their own exercise, even if they are liberal about money.
Michael Bang Petersen, associate professor in the Department of Political Science and Government at Aarhus University, and evolutionary psychology colleagues at UC Santa Barbara say the strength/politics connection is due to evolution, which is sure to annoy biologists.
The Plot Of The Week - Pick Your Favourite μ
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Post-Racial: Darker Skin On White People Leads To Positive Bias For Darker Skin
The Rubber Hand illusion never fails to teach us new things - not just about neuroscience, but also about culture.
If you are not familiar with the Rubber Hand illusion, it shows that the combination of seeing a touch on a rubber hand and feeing a touch on your own creates the illusion that the fake hand is now part of your body. In a new paper, scholars did that; they asked participants to look at a fake hand being touched, while at the same time the experimenter touched the participants' own hand, hidden out of view.
Helmets Prevent Head Injuries But That Doesn't Mean Helmet Laws Do
Between 1994 and 2008, Canada had 66,716 hospital admissions for cycling accidents. 30% of those were head injuries. Cyclists are vulnerable road users and head injuries account for 75% of cycling-related deaths. It's a dangerous way to travel and so the debate has long been whether or not helmet legislation makes any difference in injuries.
During that time, there was a substantial and consistent fall in the rate of hospital admissions for cycling related head injuries - and reductions were greatest in provinces with helmet legislation - but that trend had been happening before the law was enacted.
Crosstalk Between Notch And Bone Morphogenetic Protein Signaling Pathways
A new study uses mouse genetics to demonstrate how a handful of workhorse signaling pathways interact to construct multiple structures that comprise the vertebrate body and how crosstalk between two of those pathways - those governed by proteins known as Notch and BMP (for Bone Morphogenetic Protein) receptors - occurs over and over in processes as diverse as forming a tooth, sculpting a heart valve and building a brain.
One Notch family protein, Notch2, shapes an eye structure known as the ciliary body (CB), most likely by ensuring that BMP signals remain loud and clear. Understanding CB construction is critical, as excessive pressure is one risk factor for glaucoma.
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