Some plants, such as succulents, have managed to grow very plump leaves. For that to happen, according to a new study in Current Biology, plants had to evolve 3-D arrangements of their leaf veins in order to maintain adequately efficient hydraulics for photosynthesis.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — A garden variety leaf is a broad, flat structure, but if the garden happens to be somewhere arid, it probably includes succulent plants with plump leaves full of precious water. Fat leaves did not emerge in the plant world easily. A new Brown University study published in Current Biology reports that to sustain efficient photosynthesis, they required a fundamental remodeling of leaf vein structure: the addition of a third dimension. (more…)
Mo Ibrahim, founder of Celtel International, one of Africa’s leading mobile telephone companies, gave the Coca-Cola World Fund at Yale Lecture, “Governance, Leadership, Civil Society, and the Private Sector: An African Perspective,” on April 23. Ibrahim is also the founder of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation to improve the quality of governance in Africa. *Source: Yale […]
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…)
