Author Archives: Guest Post

Delhi International Airport Partners with IBM to Create a Smarter Air Terminal

*Largest network infrastructure project of its kind in India to improve passenger satisfaction*

NEW DEHLI – 16 Dec 2010: Delhi International Airport (P) Limited (DIAL) has partnered with IBM India to establish a common-use infrastructure in New Delhi’s Passenger Terminal Building 3 that will automate its operations and improve customer satisfaction to give the airport a competitive edge through quality service. The unified network solution integrates all of the communications across Terminal 3 and its facilities so that airport operations, airlines and other tenants can better share and exchange key information across their related operations to more efficiently deploy their resources and meet the growing demands of the India aviation market. (more…)

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comScore Releases November 2010 U.S. Search Engine Rankings

RESTON, VA, December 15, 2010 – comScore, Inc., a leader in measuring the digital world, today released its monthly comScore qSearch analysis of the U.S. search marketplace. Google Sites led the explicit core search market in November with 66.2 percent of searches conducted. 

The November 2010 qSearch figures represent the third month of results including the impact of Google Instant Search, a Google search feature that delivers results in real-time while users type their query. To learn more about how comScore is measuring search activity as users engage with Google Instant Search, please read our blog post on the subject: https://blog.comscore.com/2010/10/comscore_september_qsearch.html  (more…)

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Go Ask ALICE: Learning About the Big Bang

Nearly 14 billion years ago, the universe began with a bang — a big one.

Scientists believe that the universe and everything within it began as an extremely hot, dense “soup” that eventually gave rise to galaxies, stars, planets and life and that continues to expand to this day.

Now scientists around the world are pushing back the frontiers of our understanding about the moment the universe was born using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a giant particle accelerator at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) near Geneva, Switzerland. (more…)

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What “Pine” Cones Reveal About the Evolution of Flowers

*Research genetically traces flowers to a single common ancestor*

From southern Africa’s pineapple lily to Western Australia’s swamp bottlebrush, flowering plants are everywhere.  Also called angiosperms, they make up 90 percent of all land-based, plant life.

New research published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides new insights into their genetic origin, an evolutionary innovation that quickly gave rise to many diverse flowering plants more than 130 million years ago. Moreover, a flower with genetic programming similar to a water lily may have started it all. (more…)

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Marijuana Use is Rising; Ecstasy Use is Beginning to Rise; and Alcohol Use is Declining Among U.S. Teens

ANN ARBOR, Mich.— Several important findings come out of this year’s Monitoring the Future study, the 36th annual, national survey of American teens in a series that launched in 1975.

• Marijuana use, which had been rising among teens for the past two years, continues to rise again this year—a sharp contrast to the considerable decline of the preceding decade.

• Ecstasy use—which fell out of favor in the early 2000s as concerns about its dangers grew—appears to be making a comeback this year, following a considerable recent decline in the belief that its use is dangerous.

• Alcohol use—and, specifically, occasions of heavy drinking—continues its long-term decline among teens into 2010, reaching historically low levels. (more…)

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Cassini Spots Potential Ice Volcano on Saturn Moon

PASADENA, Calif. — NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has found possible ice volcanoes on Saturn’s moon Titan that are similar in shape to those on Earth that spew molten rock.

Topography and surface composition data have enabled scientists to make the best case yet in the outer solar system for an Earth-like volcano landform that erupts in ice. The results were presented on December 14 at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco. (more…)

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High-Tech Software and Unmanned Planes Allow Scientists to Keep Tabs on Arctic Seals

A novel project using cameras mounted on unmanned aircraft flying over the Arctic is serving double duty by assessing the characteristics of declining sea ice and using the same aerial photos to pinpoint seals that have hauled up on ice floes.

The project is the first to use aircraft to monitor ice and seals in remote areas without putting pilots and observers at risk, said Elizabeth Weatherhead of the University of Colorado at Boulder, who is leading the study team. Weatherhead is a senior scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, a joint venture of CU-Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (more…)

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