Data from the research plots on Tumamoc Hill reveal changes in the Sonoran Desert and have been important to key advances in the science of ecology
Researchers at the University of Arizona’s Tumamoc Hill have digitized 106 years of growth data on individual plants, making the information available for study by people all over the world. (more…)
Berkeley Lab researchers work on new building standards after discovering previously unknown indoor air pollutants.
For decades, no one worried much about the air quality inside people’s homes unless there was secondhand smoke or radon present. Then scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) made the discovery that the aggregate health consequences of poor indoor air quality are as significant as those from all traffic accidents or infectious diseases in the United States. One major source of indoor pollutants in the home is cooking.
The Berkeley Lab scientists are now working on turning those research findings into science-based solutions, including better standards for residential buildings and easier ways to test for the hazardous pollutants. These efforts are the result of a paper published in Environmental Health Perspectives in 2012 that described a new method for estimating the chronic health impact of indoor air pollutants. That research uncovered two pollutants that previously had not been recognized as a cause for concern—fine particles and a gas called acrolein. (more…)
Twitter can easily teach people about social movements such as Occupy Wall Street and even entice them to participate, according to a new study by a Michigan State University education researcher.
The social networking site – which lets users read, send and group together 140-character messages known as tweets – can actually be a better source of information than traditional news sources and online search engines, Benjamin Gleason reports in the journal American Behavioral Scientist. (more…)
A roughly 3.5-mile high Martian mound that scientists suspect preserves evidence of a massive lake might actually have formed as a result of the Red Planet’s famously dusty atmosphere, an analysis of the mound’s features suggests. If correct, the research could dilute expectations that the mound holds evidence of a large body of water, which would have important implications for understanding Mars’ past habitability. (more…)
There is a perception in some tech circles that older programmers aren’t able to keep pace with rapidly changing technology, and that they are discriminated against in the software field. But a new study from North Carolina State University indicates that the knowledge and skills of programmers actually improve over time – and that older programmers know as much (or more) than their younger peers when it comes to recent software platforms.
“We wanted to explore these perceptions of veteran programmers as being out of step with emerging technologies and see if we could determine whether older programmers are actually keeping up with changes in the field,” says Dr. Emerson Murphy-Hill, an assistant professor of computer science at NC State and co-author of a paper on the research. “And we found that, in some cases, veteran programmers even have a slight edge.” (more…)
Some thirty million years ago, Ganges river dolphins diverged from other toothed whales, making them one of the oldest species of aquatic mammals that use echolocation, or biosonar, to navigate and find food. This also makes them ideal subjects for scientists working to understand the evolution of echolocation among toothed whales.
New research, led by Frants Havmand Jensen, a Danish Council for Independent Research | Natural Sciences postdoctoral fellow at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, shows that freshwater dolphins produce echolocation signals at very low sound intensities compared to marine dolphins, and that Ganges river dolphins echolocate at surprisingly low sound frequencies. The study, “Clicking in shallow rivers,” was published in the journal PLOS ONE. (more…)
Ainissa Ramirez, associate professor of mechanical engineering, describes the science behind a tasty bit of chemistry — ice cream. She shows how to make ice cream using liquid nitrogen, which is as cold as the surface of Neptune, and describes why these cold temperatures makes ice cream, creamier. She demonstrates how our knowledge of how […]
Richard Kirkendall is a University of Washington professor emeritus of history and editor of the new book “Civil Liberties and the Legacy of Harry S. Truman.” He answered a few questions about the book for UW Today.
Q: What’s the scope of the book?
A: The book surveys the civil liberties issue during the Truman presidency of 1945-1953, an especially important time in the history of this essential feature of the American political system.
The book begins with two chapters on Truman as a civil libertarian, one on his identification of himself, the other on his relations with Japanese-Americans, the victims during World War II of a major violation of American principles. (more…)
