Like urban bike-sharing programs everywhere, Chicago’s Divvy must contend with a key problem: due to commuting patterns, some bike stations empty out fast while others fill up quickly, leaving no space for more drop-offs.
But such urban problems can be addressed with socially minded computer science, as a group of 50 Chicago high school students learned recently during a daylong conference at the University of Chicago. (more…)
Talk about a precious stone — the largest piece of the only known meteorite from the planet Mercury has found its way to Yale, where it is now on display at the Peabody Museum of Natural History.
Known as NWA 7325, the fist-size, greenish space rock is a rarity among rarities: there just aren’t many verified planetary meteorites. Scientists know of about 70 from Mars and, until now, none from any of the other planets in Earth’s solar system. There are about 180 known meteorites from the moon. NWA 7325 is the first believed to be from Mercury. (more…)
North Carolina State University researchers have a developed a technique for efficiently producing nanoscale gold rods in large quantities while simultaneously controlling the dimensions of the nanorods and their optical properties. The optical properties of gold nanorods make them desirable for use in biomedical applications ranging from imaging technologies to cancer treatment.(more…)
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity resumed full science operations on Saturday, Nov. 23.
Activities over the weekend included use of Curiosity’s robotic arm to deliver portions of powdered rock to a laboratory inside the rover. The powder has been stored in the arm since the rover collected it by drilling into the target rock “Cumberland” six months ago. Several portions of the powder have already been analyzed. The laboratory has flexibility for examining duplicate samples in different ways. (more…)
There is no approved medicine to treat polyomaviruses, which afflict people with weakened immune systems, but scientists have found that a chemical compound called Retro-2 is able to reduce significantly the infectivity and spread of the viruses in lab cell cultures. Now they are working to improve it.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — A team of scientists reports that a small-molecule compound showed significant success in controlling the infectivity and spread of three polyomaviruses in human cell cultures. To date there has been no medicine approved to treat such viruses, which prey on transplant recipients, people with HIV, and others whose immune systems have been weakened. (more…)
A new species of carnivorous dinosaur – one of the three largest ever discovered in North America – lived alongside and competed with small-bodied tyrannosaurs 98 million years ago. This newly discovered species, Siats meekerorum, (pronounced see-atch) was the apex predator of its time, and kept tyrannosaurs from assuming top predator roles for millions of years.
Named after a cannibalistic man-eating monster from Ute tribal legend, Siats is a species of carcharodontosaur, a group of giant meat-eaters that includes some of the largest predatory dinosaurs ever discovered. The only other carcharodontosaur known from North America is Acrocanthosaurus, which roamed eastern North America more than 10 million years earlier. Siats is only the second carcharodontosaur ever discovered in North America; Acrocanthosaurus, discovered in 1950, was the first. (more…)
Berkeley Study Provides Unprecedented Details on Ultrafast Processes in Diamond Nitrogen Vacancy Centers
From supersensitive detections of magnetic fields to quantum information processing, the key to a number of highly promising advanced technologies may lie in one of the most common defects in diamonds. Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley have taken an important step towards unlocking this key with the first ever detailed look at critical ultrafast processes in these diamond defects. (more…)
At the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego Nov. 10, 2013, Brown University scientists presented research showing what happens in the brain during sleep to lock in learning of a visually oriented “Where’s Waldo”-like task.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — As any indignant teacher would scold, students must be awake to learn. But what science is showing with increasing sophistication is how the brain uses sleep for learning as well. At the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego Nov. 10, 2013, Brown University researchers discussed new research describing the neural mechanism by which the sleeping brain locks in learning of a visual task. (more…)
