Author Archives: Guest Post

Free iPad App from IBM and Eames Office, Reinvents Iconic ’60s-Era Infographic on History of Math

*Vintage Timeline Designed by Charles and Ray Eames Continues to Inspire Interest in Math and Science*

ARMONK, N.Y. – 05 Apr 2012: To celebrate the history of math and its impact on the world, IBM has released Minds of Modern Mathematics, an iPad app that re-imagines a classic 50-foot infographic on the history of math created by husband-and-wife design team Charles and Ray Eames and displayed at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York City.

The app, which can be downloaded from the iPad App Store, is an interactive vintage-meets-digital experience for students, teachers, and tech fans that illustrates how mathematics has advanced art, science, music and architecture. It reinvents the massive timeline on the history of math from 1000 AD to 1960 that was part of Mathematica: A World of Numbers…and Beyond, IBM’s milestone World’s Fair exhibit. (more…)

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Many Young People Would Rather Surf the Web than Drive a Car

ANN ARBOR, Mich.— More young adults today would rather hit the information highway than the open highway, say University of Michigan researchers.

In a new study in the journal Traffic Injury Prevention, Michael Sivak and Brandon Schoettle of the U-M Transportation Research Institute found that having a higher proportion of Internet users was associated with lower licensure rates among young persons.

And this is just not in the United States; it’s happening in other countries, too. (more…)

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Soy and Menopause

*Large-scale study finds soy may alleviate hot flashes in menopause*

In the most comprehensive study to date to examine the effects of soy on menopause, researchers have found that two daily servings of soy can reduce the frequency and severity of hot flashes by up to 26 percent, compared to a placebo.

The findings, published in Menopause: The Journal of the North American Menopause Association, reviewed 19 previous studies that examined more than 1,200 women. (more…)

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Organics Probably Formed Easily in Early Solar System

Complex organic compounds, including many important to life on Earth, were readily produced under conditions that likely prevailed in the primordial solar system. Scientists at the University of Chicago and NASA Ames Research Center came to this conclusion after linking computer simulations to laboratory experiments.

Fred Ciesla, assistant professor in geophysical sciences at UChicago, simulated the dynamics of the solar nebula, the cloud of gas and dust from which the sun and the planets formed. Although every dust particle within the nebula behaved differently, they all experienced the conditions needed for organics to form over a simulated million-year period. (more…)

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Yale Center for British Art to partner with Google on expanded Art Project

The Yale Center for British Art is partnering with the Google Art Project to share the museum’s renowned collections with viewers around the world. The collaboration is part of a major global expansion of the pioneering Art Project, which now consists of 151 partners in 40 countries.

The Yale Center for British Art — which houses the largest collection of British art outside the United Kingdom — is one of only six university museums in the world to collaborate with Google. It is one of only 29 institutions in the United States and is the only museum in Connecticut to participate. (more…)

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Clocking an Accelerating Universe: First Results from BOSS

Berkeley Lab scientists are the leaders of BOSS, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey. They and their colleagues in the third Sloan Digital Sky Survey have announced the most precise measurements ever made of the era when dark energy turned on.

Some six billion light years distant, almost halfway from now back to the big bang, the universe was undergoing an elemental change. Held back until then by the mutual gravitational attraction of all the matter it contained, the universe had been expanding ever more slowly. Then, as matter spread out and its density decreased, dark energy took over and expansion began to accelerate.

Today BOSS, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, the largest component of the third Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III), announced the most accurate measurement yet of the distance scale of the universe during the era when dark energy turned on. (more…)

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Seeing Double: 1 in 30 Babies Born in U.S. is a Twin

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Women having children at older ages and the growing availability of fertility treatments has led to a marked increase in the birth of twins: In 2009, one in every 30 babies born in the United States was a twin compared with one in every 53 in 1980.

The findings, presented by Michigan State University’s Barbara Luke this week at the 14th Congress of the International Society of Twin Studies in Florence, Italy, have important health implications, including greater morbidity and mortality risks and higher health care costs. (more…)

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