Expert in Arabic Studies Honoured by British Academy
Professor Dionisius A. Agius of the University of Exeter’s Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies has been elected as a Fellow of the British Academy. (more…)
Professor Dionisius A. Agius of the University of Exeter’s Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies has been elected as a Fellow of the British Academy. (more…)
Where do turtles belong on the evolutionary tree? For decades, the mystery has proven as tough to crack as the creatures’ shells. With their body armor and retractable heads, turtles are such unique creatures that scientists have found it difficult to classify the strange animals in terms of their origins and closest relatives.
“We know turtles evolved from a common ancestor along with birds, lizards and snakes about 300 million years ago, but who modern-day turtles are most closely related to is one of the biggest and most controversial questions in the field of systematics,” said Tyler Lyson, a Yale University graduate student who studies the evolutionary relationships between different animal groups. (more…)
ANN ARBOR, Mich.—A positive outlook on life might lower the risk of having a stroke, according to a new University of Michigan study. (more…)
An international team of astronomers led by the California Institute of Technology and involving the University of Colorado Boulder has discovered the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe. (more…)
*IBM GPFS Storage Technology Scans 10 Billion Files in 43 Minutes*
SAN JOSE, Calif., – 22 Jul 2011: Researchers from IBM today demonstrated the future of large-scale storage systems by successfully scanning 10 billion files on a single system in just 43 minutes, shattering the previous record of one billion files in three hours by a factor of 37.
Growing at unprecedented scales, this advance unifies data environments on a single platform, instead of being distributed across several systems that must be separately managed. It also dramatically reduces and simplifies data management tasks, allowing more information to be stored in the same technology, rather than continuing to buy more and more storage. (more…)
*Students are blogging about their internship experiences from destinations as far away as Switzerland and Africa.*
At the University of Arizona, summer internships matter.
Three graduate students from the UA Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health are working as interns across the globe this summer. (more…)
*A fossil from north-eastern China has revealed that terrestrial reptiles were giving birth to live young at least as early as 120 million years ago.*
The newly discovered fossil of a pregnant lizard proves that some squamate reptiles (lizards and snakes) were giving birth to live young, rather than laying eggs, in the Early Cretaceous period – much earlier than previously thought. The fossil shows a pregnant female filled with the tiny skeletons of more than 15 baby lizards at a stage of development similar to that of late embryos of modern lizards. The mother lizard, which is 30 centimetres long (excluding her tail), probably died only a few days before giving birth.
The discovery is described in the journal Naturwissenschaften by scientists from UCL (University College London) and the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing. (more…)
COLUMBUS, Ohio – Instead of calming fears, the death of Osama bin Laden actually led more Americans to feel threatened by Muslims living in the United States, according to a new nationwide survey.
In the weeks following the U.S. military campaign that killed bin Laden, the head of the terrorist organization Al Qaeda, American attitudes toward Muslim Americans took a significant negative shift, results showed. (more…)