Our values change as we age. This is the main conclusion of the 2011 SOM survey, from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, where Swedes were asked to rate the importance of different values. Young people want their lives to be exciting, whereas the older prioritise national security. Cultural life does not promote physical health, but does affect a person's perceived well-being. Three Swedes in five throw away clothes that are in usable condition.
Tech
EUGENE, Ore. -- (Sept. 18, 2012) -- An interdisciplinary team of scientists from seven U.S. institutions says a disregard of three critical protocols, including sorting samples by size, explains why a group challenging the theory of a North American meteor-impact event some 12,900 years ago failed to find iron- and silica-rich magnetic particles in the sites they investigated.
Not separating samples of the materials into like-sized groupings made for an avoidable layer of difficulty, said co-author Edward K. Vogel, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon.
Using ultra-low input power densities, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have demonstrated for the first time how low-power "optical nanotweezers" can be used to trap, manipulate, and probe nanoparticles, including fragile biological samples.
Researchers have developed a new way to observe and track large numbers of rapidly moving objects under a microscope, capturing precise motion paths in three dimensions.
Over the course of the study--reported online Sept. 17, 2012, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences--researchers followed an unprecedented 24,000 rapidly moving cells over wide fields of view and through large sample volumes, recording each cell's path for as long as 20 seconds.
Early in the morning of September 12 the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), mounted on the Victor Blanco Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, recorded its first images of a southern sky spangled with galaxies. Galaxies up to eight billion light years away were captured on DECam's focal plane, whose imager consists of 62 charge-coupled devices (CCDs) invented and developed by engineers and physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Magnetically imploded tubes called liners, intended to help produce controlled nuclear fusion at scientific "break-even" energies or better within the next few years, have functioned successfully in preliminary tests, according to a Sandia research paper accepted for publication by Physical Review Letters (PRL).
The U.S. federal government is significantly underestimating the costs of carbon pollution because it is using a faulty analytical model, according to a new study published in the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences.
A more appropriate accounting of costs would pave the way to cleaner, more economically efficient sources of power generation, the study found.
The earth's limited surface is expected to stretch to everything: food for soon to be nine billion people, feed for our beef cattle and fowl, fuel for our cars, forests for our paper, cotton for our clothes. What is more, the earth's forests are preferably to be left untouched to stabilise the climate. Human ecologist and economist Kenneth Hermele will shortly be defending a thesis at Lund University, Sweden, in which he demonstrates that the struggle for land is intensifying rapidly.
Breast milk provides important nutrients and immune factors to help meet the nutritional needs of infants and minimize the risk of illness and other complications. However, breast milk alone may not fully meet the nutritional needs of premature infants.
Sweet sorghum is primarily grown in the United States as a source of sugar for syrup and molasses. But the sturdy grass has other attributes that could make it uniquely suited to production as a bioenergy crop, U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) studies suggest.
Uncertainties relating to the assessment of effectiveness of emission reduction measures are considerable. In order to manage these, there is an evident need to develop uniform assessment methods for ensuring that the assumed emission reductions are also achieved in practice.
Explosions caused by boiling liquid could be reduced by suppressing the liquid from bubbling, according to a new study involving the University of Melbourne and Swinburne University of Technology, Australia.
The research, which is the first of its kind, has identified a specially engineered steel surface that allows liquids to boil without bubbling.
CORVALLIS, Ore. – The transparent electronics that were pioneered at Oregon State University may find one of their newest applications as a next-generation replacement for some uses of non-volatile flash memory, a multi-billion dollar technology nearing its limit of small size and information storage capacity.
A laser with a frequency stability so far unequalled: This is the result of a research cooperation of the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) within the scope of the Excellence Cluster QUEST (Centre for Quantum Engineering and Space-Time Research) with colleagues from the American NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology)/JILA. Their development, about which they report in the scientific journal "Nature Photonics", is important for optical spectroscopy with highest resolution, e.g. of ultra-cold atoms.
With an 8.1 percent August unemployment rate and 12.5 million Americans out of work, a new Temple University study examines a neglected area of research: how the unemployment process impacts the willingness of those laid off to endorse or return to their previous employer.