EAST LANSING, Mich. — A strong showing in the final two presidential debates could help Barack Obama regain some of the ground lost to Mitt Romney after the first verbal showdown in Denver, argues Michigan State University’s head debate coach. (more…)
ANN ARBOR — The University of Michigan has established the largest digital collection of materials relating to the 1918 influenza epidemic in the United States. (more…)
Peter Willis and his team of researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., had a problem. Actually, more like they had a solution that needed a problem. Confused? Let’s let Peter give it a shot… (more…)
North Carolina’s fall foliage should put on a vivid show as it washes over the state this month. With color already beginning to pop in the western mountains, the foliage forecast is bright, says Dr. Robert Bardon, forestry and environmental resources professor at North Carolina State University. (more…)
Katherine Boo talks of hope and struggle in Annawadi, India
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Katherine Boo found that despite having to struggle daily to survive, the people who live in Annawadi, India, also share the common hopes, dreams and aspirations of people everywhere in seeking to better themselves and their children. (more…)
Join the Great ShakeOut on October 18, 2012, to prepare
The Central Virginia Seismic Zone, it’s called, and it sometimes shakes everything in sight. (more…)
Warmer waters flowed to shelfbreak south of New England
At a meeting with New England commercial fishermen last December, physical oceanographers Glen Gawarkiewicz and Al Plueddemann from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) were alerted by three fishermen about unusually high surface water temperatures and strong currents on the outer continental shelf south of New England. (more…)
Berkeley Lab Researchers Develop New Technique for Heterogenizing Homogenous Nano Catalysts
Catalysts are substances that speed up the rates of chemical reactions without themselves being chemically changed. Industrial catalysts come in two main types – heterogeneous, in which the catalyst is in a different phase from the reactants; and homogeneous, in which catalyst and the reactants are in the same phase. Heterogeneous catalysts are valued for their sustainability because they can be recycled. Homogeneous catalysts are valued for their product selectivity as their properties can be easily tuned through relatively simple chemistry.
Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have combined the best properties of both types of industrial catalysts by encapsulating nanoclusters of a metallic heterogeneous catalyst within the branched arms of the molecules known as dendrimers. (more…)
