Culture | Page 2903 | Science Codex

Do all males lie and cheat? Yes. In crayfish, anyway

Intimidation and threats are common throughout society, whether it’s in the school playground, sporting arena or boardroom. Threatening behaviour is equally widespread among non-human animals.

Individuals signal their superior strength to competitors to obtain food, resolve territorial disputes and acquire mates. Current theory insists that signals of strength should be honest. Surprisingly researchers have found that dishonest signals are used routinely during dominance disputes by male Australian crayfish.

Efficiency sensing - how bacteria talk to each other

Bacteria must talk to each other, in a sense. They use signals to inform neighbors whether to switch certain genes on or off and this allows them to adapt to changing circumstances.

GUN1 on the road to photosynthetic factories

Scientists have identified three different signals that indicate damage to chloroplasts— the photosynthetic factories of plant cells that give plants their green color —but little is known about how the signal gets passed on to the nucleus. Scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies made a big step towards explaining how chloroplasts let a cell's nucleus know when things start to go wrong at the periphery so nuclear gene expression can be adjusted accordingly.

Impossible asteroid siblings

Combining precise observations obtained by ESO's Very Large Telescope with those gathered by a network of smaller telescopes, astronomers have described in unprecedented detail the double asteroid Antiope, which is shown to be a pair of rubble-pile chunks of material, of about the same size, whirling around one another in a perpetual pas de deux. The two components are egg-shaped despite their very small sizes.

MIT visualizes the secret of turbulent fluid flow

Picture the flow of water over a rock. At very low speeds, the water looks like a smooth sheet skimming the rock's surface. As the water rushes faster, the flow turns into turbulent, roiling whitewater that can overturn your raft.

Were Thomas Jefferson's Ancestors Muslim?

DNA testing carried out by University of Leicester geneticists and funded by The Wellcome Trust has thrown new light on the ancestry of one of the USA’s most revered figures, the third President, Thomas Jefferson.

Almost 10 years ago, the University of Leicester team, led by Professor Mark Jobling, together with international collaborators, showed that Thomas Jefferson had fathered at least one of the sons of Sally Hemings, a slave of Jefferson’s.

Solar power at play

For the very first time, astronomers have witnessed the speeding up of an asteroid's rotation, and have shown that it is due to a theoretical effect predicted but never seen before. The international team of scientists used an armada of telescopes to discover that the asteroid's rotation period currently decreases by 1 millisecond every year, as a consequence of the heating of the asteroid's surface by the Sun. Eventually it may spin faster than any known asteroid in the solar system and even break apart.

Researchers find a new way to read nanoscale vibrations

Nanomechanical oscillators -- tiny strips of vibrating silicon only a few hundred atoms thick -- are the subject of extensive study by nanotechnology researchers. They could someday replace bulky quartz crystals in electronic circuits or be used to detect and identify bacteria and viruses.

Linear arrays of nanotubes offer path to high-performance electronics

Despite the attractive electrical properties and physical features of single-walled carbon nanotubes, incorporating them into scalable integrated circuits has proven to be a challenge because of difficulties in manipulating and positioning these molecular scale objects and in achieving sufficient current outputs.

Now, researchers at the University of Illinois, Lehigh University and Purdue University have developed an approach that uses dense arrays of aligned and linear nanotubes as a thin-film semiconductor material suitable for integration into electronic devices.

Is solar UV frying fish?

Marine and freshwater organisms could be facing damage due to increasing levels of ultraviolet (UV) radiation, according to a United Nations (UN) commissioned review.

The news is reported in the latest edition of the Royal Society of Chemistry journal Photochemical & Photobiological Sciences.

Aquatic ecosystems produce over half the biomass of the Earth and are an integral part of the planet’s biosphere.

Degrading ionic liquids

Ultrasonic irradiation can break down ionic liquids into more environmentally benign compounds, say scientists.

Ionic liquids are widely regarded as a greener alternative to many commonly used solvents. But, concerns about their toxicity have raised questions about their use in large scale industrial applications, especially those that involve the creation of large amounts of waste.High frequency sound waves break ionic liquids into non-toxic components. Image: Chemical Science

Faulted modeling

Factoring in crustal strength changes along the San Andreas Fault would improve the predictive models that researchers use to understand the likelihood and intensity of earthquakes there. That's the conclusion from a study published in the April issue of Geology titled, "Diffuse interseismic deformation across the Pacific-North America plate boundary."

Sex in the 1700s

Prostitutes, perversions and public scandals – the stuff of the 21st century tabloids was familiar to readers three centuries earlier, according to new research from the University of Leeds.

The reading of erotic literature was already a social activity 300 years ago.18th c. corset. Credit: www.museumofcostume.co.uk

The next great earthquake

The 2004 Sumatra-Andaman earthquake and resulting tsunami are now infamous for the damage they caused, but at the time many scientists believed this area was unlikely to create a quake of such magnitude. In the March 23 issue of the journal Science, a geophysicist from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute urges the public and policy makers to consider all subduction-type tectonic boundaries to be "locked, loaded, and dangerous."

New archaeological findings on political power in Peru

A team from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the University of Almería has completed its second part of the "Proyecto La Puntilla", an archaeological expedition to the Peruvian province of Nazca, where last year it discovered a new type of construction. The latest findings show that a new political power based on the exercise of violence emerged on the south coast of Peru two thousand years ago. There was a State in which an aristocracy, based in Cahuachi, exercised its dominion on other, poorer communities in the Nazca Valley.