A research team at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) has developed a software tool that enables users to perform in-depth analysis of modeling and simulation data, then visualize the results onscreen. The new data analysis and visualization tool offers improved ease of use compared to similar tools, the researchers say, and could be readily adapted for use with existing data sets in a variety of disciplines.(more…)
How do children come to realize that they themselves might be targets of prejudice? It may depend on their age. New research conducted at the University of Toronto shows that a six-year-old may be influenced most by direct instruction about prejudice, but once that child gets closer to 10, she begins to rely more on her own experiences.
“Young children are information hungry – they are eagerly searching for general rules to help in mapping out their social worlds,” write researchers Sonia Kang, an assistant professor in the Department of Management at U of T Mississauga and the Rotman School of Management, and Professor Michael Inzlicht of the Department of Psychology in this month’s Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. (more…)
Washington, D.C. — Scientists have long speculated about why there is a large change in the strength of rocks that lie at the boundary between two layers immediately under Earth’s crust: the lithosphere and underlying asthenosphere. Understanding this boundary is central to our knowledge of plate tectonics and thus the formation and evolution of our planet as we know it today. A new technique for observing this transition, particularly in the portion of Earth’s mantle that lies beneath the Pacific Ocean basin, has led Carnegie and NASA Goddard scientist Nick Schmerr to new insight on the origins of the lithosphere and asthenosphere. His work is published March 23 in Science.
The lithosphere-asthenosphere boundary, or LAB, represents the transition from hot, convecting mantle asthenosphere to overlying cold and rigid lithosphere. The oceanic lithosphere thickens as it cools over time, and eventually sinks back into the mantle at Earth’s so-called subduction zones. (more…)
Glaciers play a vital role in Earth’s climate system, and it’s critical to understand what contributes to their fluctuation.
Increased global temperatures are frequently viewed as the cause of glacial melt, but a new study of Patagonia’s Gualas Glacier highlights the role of precipitation in the glacier’s fluctuation. The study, conducted by Sébastien Bertrand of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and his colleagues, reconstructs a 5,400 year-record of the region’s glacial environment and climate, comparing past temperature and rainfall data with sediment records of glacier fluctuations and the historical observations of early Spanish explorers. (more…)
‘Wonder material’ may hold key to fast, inexpensive genetic sequencing
Look at the tip of that old pencil in your desk drawer, and what you’ll see are layers of graphite that are thousands of atoms thick. Use the pencil to draw a line on a piece of paper, and the mark you’ll see on the page is made up of hundreds of one-atom layers.
But when scientists found a way—using, essentially, a piece of ordinary sticky tape—to peel off a layer of graphite that was just a single atom thick, they called the two-dimensional material graphene and, in 2010, won the Nobel Prize in physics for the discovery. (more…)
LUDHIANA, India – 23 Mar 2012: IBM today announced the opening of a new branch office in Ludhiana, Punjab as part of the company’s continued geographic expansion across India.
The Ludhiana branch is IBM’s seventh new office to be opened in India in the past 12 months after those in Coimbatore, Indore, Guwahati, Dehradun, Raipur and Visakhapatnam. IBM is currently focused on increasing its presence in smaller, rapidly developing cities as India’s regions play an increasingly important part in the country’s economic growth. (more…)
*Sports Category Traffic Jumps 79 Percent on First Day of Tournament, with Smartphone and Tablet Growth Outpacing the Average*
RESTON, VA, March 23, 2012 – comScore, Inc., a leader in measuring the digital world, today released the results of a study of web usage related to the 2012 NCAA Tournament based on data from comScore Device Essentials™. The study, which analyzed browser-based (i.e. non-app) page views to the Sports content category, showed that consumers dramatically increased their access of Sports content across all three primary screens for web access – computer, tablet and smartphone – as they tried to stay plugged into the first 32 games of the tournament in real-time. (more…)
A new online portal and smartphone app lets Washington and Oregon residents enter the addresses of their homes, schools, workplaces or kids’ day care centers to check if they’re in harm’s way should a tsunami hit.
Materials available via the tool or phone application can be used to map out evacuation routes for you, your family, employees or students so everyone is ready when danger arises. There’s a way to create a free account so users can map and save multiple locations and evacuation routes in one place. (more…)
