EAST LANSING, Mich. — Climate change is already having an effect on the safety of the world’s food supplies and unless action is taken it’s only going to get worse, a Michigan State University professor told a symposium at this year’s meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. (more…)
*The Microsoft Local Language Program extends software to often underserved cultures, allowing people to experience technology in their native language. Feb. 21 is International Mother Language Day*
REDMOND – Feb. 21, 2011 – While visiting a government office in Vietnam nearly a decade ago, a Microsoft employee noticed one of the employees had Post-It® notes all the way around her computer monitor.
The notes weren’t daily “to-dos” or grocery lists, but English-to-Vietnamese translations of common Microsoft Windows and Office commands such as “file,” “save” and “print.” At the time, there was no Microsoft software available in Vietnamese. (more…)
Ignoring the stresses of an unemployed spouse’s job search does not bode well for the employed spouse’s job productivity or home life, says a University of Colorado Boulder professor.
Associate Professor Maw-Der Foo of CU-Boulder’s Leeds School of Business studies employee workplace issues, including those related to interpersonal relationships. (more…)
ANN ARBOR, Mich.— Rising carbon dioxide levels associated with global warming may affect interactions between plants and the insects that eat them, altering the course of plant evolution, research at the University of Michigan suggests.
The research focused on the effects of elevated carbon dioxide on common milkweed, Asclepias syriaca. Milkweed is one of many plants that produce toxic or bitter chemical compounds to protect themselves from being eaten by insects. These chemical defenses are the result of a long history of interactions between the plants and insects such as monarch caterpillars that feed on them. (more…)
PASADENA, Calif. — The Herschel Space Observatory has revealed how much dark matter it takes to form a new galaxy bursting with stars. Herschel is a European Space Agency cornerstone mission supported with important NASA contributions.
The findings are a key step in understanding how dark matter, an invisible substance permeating our universe, contributed to the birth of massive galaxies in the early universe. (more…)
COLUMBUS, Ohio – Scientists are hoping that heat therapy could eventually replace a complex drug regimen as the first-line treatment of a parasitic skin infection common in tropical and subtropical regions of the world.
The researchers successfully treated the skin infection with heat therapy in two patients whose immune systems were deficient, which lowered their bodies’ ability to respond to medication. Both patients have remained free of the parasitic disease, called cutaneous leishmaniasis, for more than a year since receiving the heat treatment.
That long-term effectiveness, especially in people with compromised immune systems, makes this one-time application of heat to skin lesions an appealing alternative to the conventional treatment for the infection — a series of about 20 consecutive daily drug injections that is rife with compliance problems, researchers say. (more…)
*Geobiologists uncover Davy Jones Locker of fossils near small village in south China*
Almost 600 million years ago, before the rapid evolution of life forms known as the Cambrian explosion, a community of seaweeds and worm-like animals lived in a quiet deep-water niche near what is now Lantian, a small village in south China.
Then they simply died, leaving some 3,000 nearly pristine fossils preserved between beds of black shale deposited in oxygen-free and unbreathable waters. (more…)
More than 50 years after the invention of the laser, scientists at Yale University have built the world’s first anti-laser, in which incoming beams of light interfere with one another in such a way as to perfectly cancel each other out. The discovery could pave the way for a number of novel technologies with applications in everything from optical computing to radiology.
Conventional lasers, which were first invented in 1960, use a so-called “gain medium,” usually a semiconductor like gallium arsenide, to produce a focused beam of coherent light-light waves with the same frequency and amplitude that are in step with one another. (more…)
