Tech

New research from Northeastern University has mapped the intellectual migration network in North America and Europe over a 2,000-year span. The team of network scientists used the birth and death locations of more than 150,000 intellectuals to map their mobility patterns in order to identify the major cultural centers on the two continents over two millennia.

A hidden hazard lurks beneath many of the roughly 156,000 gas stations across the United States.

The spread of misinformation through online social networks is becoming an increasingly worrying problem. Researchers in India have now modeled how such fictions and diffuse through those networks. They described details of their research and the taxonomy that could help those who run, regulate and use online social networks better understand how to slow or even prevent the spread of misinformation to the wider public.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — A Florida State University researcher found that bacteria in the Gulf of Mexico consumed many of the toxic components of the oil released during the Deepwater Horizon spill in the months after the spill, but not the most toxic contaminants.

In two new studies conducted in a deep sea plume, Assistant Professor Olivia Mason found a species of bacteria called Colwellia likely consumed gaseous hydrocarbons and perhaps benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene compounds that were released as part of the oil spill.

The enormous conflagration known as the Rim Fire was in full fury, raging swiftly from crown to crown among mature trees, when it entered the backcountry of Yosemite National Park in California's Sierra Nevada in late August 2013. But inside the park, the battle began to turn, enacting a case study in the way management decisions and drought can combine to fuel large, severe fires.

Consumers can save money on their electricity bills and negotiate better deals by joining forces with similar groups of customers to switch energy suppliers according to new research.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (July 30, 2014) A team of Whitehead Institute researchers is bringing new levels of efficiency and accuracy to one of the most essential albeit tedious tasks of bench science: pipetting. And, in an effort to aid the scientific community at large, the group has established an open source system that enables anyone to benefit from this development free of charge.

To help Americans make better decisions about what they eat, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) earlier this year proposed significant changes to the Nutrition Facts label found on nearly every food product in the U.S. An article in Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly news magazine of the American Chemical Society, explains the suggested updates — and the fight that has ensued.

Washington, DC—Today scientists unveiled the first high-resolution map of the carbon stocks stored on land throughout the entire country of Perú. The new and improved methodology used to make the map marks a sea change for future market-based carbon economies. The new carbon map also reveals Perú's extremely high ecological diversity and it provides the critical input to studies of deforestation and forest degradation for conservation, land use, and enforcement purposes.

The failure of some obese individuals to generate or detect adequate signals to stop eating has been frequently been reported in medical science. Researchers at the University of Leeds, UK have devised a simple metric to quantify satiety responsiveness - Satiety Quotient (SQ) – and are applying it to their research to find out why some people struggle to manage their weight and whether certain foods may help to amplify sensations of fullness.

New findings from a NASA-funded instrument have resolved a decades-old puzzle about a fog of low-energy X-rays observed over the entire sky. Thanks to refurbished detectors first flown on a NASA sounding rocket in the 1970s, astronomers have now confirmed the long-held suspicion that much of this glow stems from a region of million-degree interstellar plasma known as the local hot bubble, or LHB.

BERKELEY — What if computer screens had glasses instead of the people staring at the monitors? That concept is not too far afield from technology being developed by computer and vision scientists at the University of California, Berkeley.

According to findings from a new study by University of Chicago Booth School of Business Professor Jane Risen, and Chicago Booth doctoral student Juliana Schroeder, it may at least be a start.

Set goal, work to achieve goal, attain goal and react accordingly — that's the script we write when we set our sights on an achievement.

But what happens when the script isn't followed, and you learn too soon that you will accomplish what you set out to do? New research from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business finds that the positive reaction one would have when succeeding is lessened if it doesn't follow the expected course.

A powerful new tool that can help advance the genetic engineering of "fuel" crops for clean, green and renewable bioenergy, has been developed by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), a multi-institutional partnership led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). The JBEI researchers have developed an assay that enables scientists to identify and characterize the function of nucleotide sugar transporters, critical components in the biosynthesis of plant cell walls.