The number of known places in our galaxy theoretically hospitable to life may be significantly greater than previously thought, according to new research.
Researchers with Planet Hunters are reporting the discovery of a Jupiter-sized planet in the so-called “habitable zone” of a star similar to Earth’s sun, as well as the identification of 15 new candidate planets also orbiting within their star’s habitable zone. (more…)
New interactive TV ad format captivates consumers beyond the 30-second spot.
REDMOND, Wash. — Jan. 7, 2013 — Microsoft Corp. today announced the double-digit engagement results of the first NUads experience, interactive polling, which it rolled out earlier in the fall of 2012 on Xbox LIVE in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.
The first wave of NUads was provided by a lineup of top advertisers, including SUBWAY® Restaurants and Toyota, which on average saw the following results with their ads on Xbox LIVE: (more…)
Dr. Russ Glenn is a lecturer at the Leiden Institute for Area Studies at Leiden University. He focuses on Chinese politics and international relations. Prior to Leiden he completed his PhD at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge. He conducted his doctoral work on Chinese energy security needs in a thesis titled: “No Blood for Oil: The strategic implications of increased Chinese oil demand on the Sino-US relationship and the Oil Peace Paradox”, where he broke down the role of oil into the military and economic aspects of supply security, and interrogated the ability of China to successfully achieve oil security. He is particularly interested in military history, Chinese, and East-Asian history, politics, and international relations. Outside of academia he is a contributing analyst at the Wikistrat Consultancy, and has been a keen coach, competitor, and coxswain in rowing for the past 11 years at Cambridge and at Brown, and has also boxed for Cambridge. (more…)
A person’s style of speech — not just the pitch of his or her voice — may help determine whether the listener perceives the speaker to be male or female, according to a University of Colorado Boulder researcher who studied transgender people transitioning from female to male.
The way people pronounce their “s” sounds and the amount of resonance they use when speaking contributes to the perception of gender, according to Lal Zimman, whose findings are based on research he completed while earning his doctoral degree from CU-Boulder’s linguistics department. (more…)
Like the impact of an elephant herd grazing on grassland, multinational banks shape the financial environment to an extent that far outweighs their small number. And like a contagious person on a transnational flight, when these giant, interconnected banks succumb to financial ills, they are uniquely positioned to infect wide swaths of the financial system.
Researchers from Princeton University, the Bank of England and the University of Oxford applied methods inspired by ecosystem stability and contagion models to banking meltdowns and found that large national and international banks wield an influence and potentially destructive power that far exceeds their actual size. (more…)
Mars Science Laboratory Mission Status Report
PASADENA, Calif. – After imaging during the holidays, NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity resumed driving Jan. 3 and pulled within arm’s reach of a sinuous rock feature called “Snake River.”
Snake River is a thin curving line of darker rock cutting through flatter rocks and jutting above sand. Curiosity’s science team plans to get a closer look at it before proceeding to other nearby rocks. (more…)
Berkeley Lab research could lead to a better understanding of the Arctic ecosystem’s impact on the planet’s climate
What does pulling a radar-equipped sled across the Arctic tundra have to do with improving our understanding of climate change? It’s part of a new way to explore the little-known world of permafrost soils, which store almost as much carbon as the rest of the world’s soils and about twice as much as is in the atmosphere.
The new approach combines several remote-sensing tools to study the Arctic landscape—above and below ground—in high resolution and over large spatial scales. It was developed by a group of researchers that includes scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). (more…)
ANN ARBOR — People setting a goal to lose weight in 2013 may want to first ask themselves if diet or exercise is more important to success. (more…)
