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Exeter Physicist Bends Light Waves on Surfboards

By Guest PostJuly 31, 2012Scienceaerospace industry, electromagnetic radiation, invisibility cloaks, light waves, metamaterials, pseudo atoms

A University of Exeter scientist is bringing together his passions for Physics and surfing with research that could inspire a host of new technologies. Dr Matt Lockyear is using foam from inside surfboards to make materials that can manipulate light.

Scientists across the globe are trying to develop materials that can refract light to create ‘invisibility cloaks’, which are of particular interest to the aerospace industry. ‘Invisibility cloaking’ means building properties into a material that allow the device to guide light waves around an object, making it invisible. (more…)

Estimate: A New Amish Community is Founded Every 3 1/2 Weeks in U.S.

By Guest PostJuly 30, 2012Culture, Politicsamish are growing, amish community members, amish men, amish population, amish settlement characteristics, new amish community, old orders

COLUMBUS, Ohio – A new census of the Amish population in the United States estimates that a new Amish community is founded, on average, about every 3 ½ weeks, and shows that more than 60 percent of all existing Amish settlements have been founded since 1990. (more…)

Deadly E. coli Strain Decoded

By Guest PostJuly 30, 2012Health, Science2011 outbreak, achilles heel, bacterium, biofilm, chris waters, e coli o157, e coli outbreak, e coli strain, german outbreak, Germany, michigan state university, o157 infection, shannon manning, shiga toxin, toxic gene

EAST LANSING, Mich. — The secret to the deadly 2011 E. coli outbreak in Germany has been decoded, thanks to research conducted at Michigan State University.

The deadliest E. coli outbreak ever, which caused 54 deaths and sickened more than 3,800 people, was traced to a particularly virulent strain that researchers had never seen in an outbreak before. In the current issue of the academic journal PLoS ONE, a team of researchers led by Shannon Manning, MSU molecular biologist and epidemiologist, suggests a way to potentially tame the killer bacteria. (more…)

Public Sightings Suggest Increase in Basking Sharks in British Waters

By Guest PostJuly 30, 2012Naturebasking sharks, brendan godley, british waters, cornwall wildlife trust, fishery, ireland, jean luc solandt, marine conservation, northeast atlantic, norway, public sightings, ruth williams, scotland, shark, uk water, university of exeter

The number of basking sharks recorded in Britain’s seas could be increasing, decades after being protected from commercial hunting in the late 20^th century.

The most comprehensive analysis ever undertaken of basking shark sightings in UK waters, by the University of Exeter, the Marine Conservation Society (MCS), Cornwall Wildlife Trust (CWT) and Wave Action, is published in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series.

The northeast Atlantic hosted an extensive commercial fishery for basking sharks, mainly in Norway, Ireland and Scotland, where more than 81,000 were killed between 1952 and 2004, hunted largely for their liver oil. Large-scale hunting ended in the UK in the middle of the twentieth century, though it continued at low levels in Norway until 2000. (more…)

Experiments Inform Study of Crowd Motion

By Guest PostJuly 29, 2012Scienceannual pilgrimage, brown university, crowd behavior, crowd cohesion, crowd motion, electromagnetism, experiment, laws, mathematics, mecca, sayles hall, sayles swarm, school of fish, the haj, william warren

To determine how crowd behavior emerges from individual actions, William Warren, professor of cognitive, linguistic, and psychological sciences, assembled his own crowds and engaged them in an unusual four-day experiment in Sayles Hall. The subjects were equipped with motion capture markers affixed like antennae to bike helmets.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — What must the staid-faced University luminaries in those portraits around Sayles Hall have thought while they watched this scene play out for four days last week? Over and over, two to 20 young men and women in bike helmets adorned with what appeared to be five large antennae walked back and forth across a cardboard-covered floor. En route to goals marked by numbers just beneath the portraits, they dodged each other and arrangements of cardboard pillars. Each time they generated patterns of foot traffic. (more…)

Going with the Flow

By Guest PostJuly 29, 2012Environmentalgal blooms, bp settlement, bruce lipphardt, buoys, carthe, deepwater horizon, dennis kirwan, drifters, google earth, gps device, gulf of mexico, helga huntley, ocean current, oceanography, oil spill, plume movement, prediction, satellite gps, university of delaware

Scientists studying ocean currents and oil spills with large-scale experiment

Scientists are releasing hundreds of floating GPS devices into the Gulf of Mexico this week near the Deepwater Horizon site to study the role of ocean currents in oil spills. The experiment is the largest in scale of its kind, deploying 300 satellite-tracked, untethered buoys, called drifters, over the course of two and a half weeks.

“We’re trying to use the drifters as a simulation of an oil spill,” said Dennis Kirwan, Mary A.S. Lighthipe Professor of Marine Studies in the University of Delaware’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment. “This is a big event in oceanography.” (more…)

From a Few Bones, the Most Primitive Snake Emerges

By Guest PostJuly 29, 2012Naturebhart anjan bhullar, bone, coniophis precedens, cretaceous period, dinosaurs, eastern wyoming, floodplain, gila monster, jacques a gauthier, lizard, lucy, marine ancestor, montana, nicholas longrich, pipe snake, primitive snake, protosnake, salamander, serpentine body, snake origin, t rex, triceratops, vertebrae characteristic, yale

Researchers at Yale have identified an ancient slithering creature from the time of T. rex as the most primitive known snake, a finding with implications for the debate over snake origins.

“It’s the missing-link snake,” said Nicholas Longrich, a postdoctoral fellow in Yale’s Department of Geology & Geophysics and the lead author of a paper about the lizard-like snake published July 25 online in the journal Nature. “It’s the ‘Lucy’ of snakes.”

The paper argues that snakes descend from terrestrial rather than marine ancestors, as recently proposed by others, and that snakes emerged once lizards developed long, limbless bodies for burrowing. (more…)

Photovoltaics from Any Semiconductor

By Guest PostJuly 29, 2012Sciencephotovoltaic effect, semiconductor, solar cells, solar energy devices, solar technologies

Berkeley Lab Technology Could Open Door to More Widespread Solar Energy Devices

A technology that would enable low-cost, high efficiency solar cells to be made from virtually any semiconductor material has been developed by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley. This technology opens the door to the use of plentiful, relatively inexpensive semiconductors, such as the promising metal oxides, sulfides and phosphides, that have been considered unsuitable for solar cells because it is so difficult to tailor their properties by chemical means. (more…)

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