ANCHORAGE, Alaska – Sea-ice habitats essential to polar bears would likely respond positively should more curbs be placed on global greenhouse gas emissions, according to a new modeling study published in the journal, Nature. (more…)
High school students’ interactions provide new look at disease transmission
Graphic showing the flu virus and its antibodies. Image credit: NIH
It’s colds and flu season, and as any parent knows, colds and flu spread like wildfire, especially through schools.
New research using human-networking theory may give a clearer picture of just how, exactly, infectious diseases such as the common cold, influenza, whooping cough and SARS can spread through a closed group of people, and even through populations at large.
With the help of 788 volunteers at a high school, Marcel Salathé, a biologist at Penn State University, developed a new technique to count the number of possible disease-spreading events that occur in a typical day.
This results are published in this week’s issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. (more…)
*Largest network infrastructure project of its kind in India to improve passenger satisfaction*
NEW DEHLI – 16 Dec 2010: Delhi International Airport (P) Limited (DIAL) has partnered with IBM India to establish a common-use infrastructure in New Delhi’s Passenger Terminal Building 3 that will automate its operations and improve customer satisfaction to give the airport a competitive edge through quality service. The unified network solution integrates all of the communications across Terminal 3 and its facilities so that airport operations, airlines and other tenants can better share and exchange key information across their related operations to more efficiently deploy their resources and meet the growing demands of the India aviation market. (more…)
More than 93% of American households experienced “substantial economic shock” in 2008-2009, according to a Rockefeller Foundation-supported study headed by political science professor Jacob Hacker. (more…)
RESTON, VA, December 15, 2010 – comScore, Inc., a leader in measuring the digital world, today released its monthly 
comScore qSearch analysis of the U.S. search marketplace. Google Sites led the explicit core search market in November with 66.2 percent of searches conducted.
The November 2010 qSearch figures represent the third month of results including the impact of Google Instant Search, a Google search feature that delivers results in real-time while users type their query. To learn more about how comScore is measuring search activity as users engage with Google Instant Search, please read our blog post on the subject: https://blog.comscore.com/2010/10/comscore_september_qsearch.html (more…)
Nearly 14 billion years ago, the universe began with a bang — a big one.
Scientists believe that the universe and everything within it began as an extremely hot, dense “soup” that eventually gave rise to galaxies, stars, planets and life and that continues to expand to this day.
Now scientists around the world are pushing back the frontiers of our understanding about the moment the universe was born using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a giant particle accelerator at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) near Geneva, Switzerland. (more…)
Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook Inc., was named Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” today for “creating a new system of exchanging information” and “changing how we all live our lives.”
Zuckerberg, 26, began the world’s largest social-networking site in 2004. The service, with more than 500 million users, has helped people connect with each other and changed definitions of privacy, Time Managing Editor Richard Stengel said in a letter on the magazine’s website. (more…)
*Research genetically traces flowers to a single common ancestor*
From southern Africa’s pineapple lily to Western Australia’s swamp bottlebrush, flowering plants are everywhere. Also called angiosperms, they make up 90 percent of all land-based, plant life.
New research published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides new insights into their genetic origin, an evolutionary innovation that quickly gave rise to many diverse flowering plants more than 130 million years ago. Moreover, a flower with genetic programming similar to a water lily may have started it all. (more…)
