As the hot, humid weather descended on Houston’s Harris County this spring, the county’s mosquito surveillance team geared up for the busiest season in its fight to get ahead of dangerous mosquito-borne illnesses such as Zika. (more…)
In 2015, starfish, octopus, crabs and other Pacific Ocean life stumbled upon a temporary addition to the seafloor, more than half a mile from the shoreline: a 38,000-pound container. But in the ocean, 10 feet by 7 feet is quite small. The shrimp exploring the seafloor made more noise than the datacenter inside the container, which consumed computing power equivalent to 300 desktop PCs. (more…)
New findings show that eating a high-fat diet beginning at puberty speeds up the development of breast cancer and may actually increase the risk of cancer similar to a type often found in younger adult women.
The research comes from the Breast Cancer and the Environment Research Program at Michigan State University and is published in the current online issue of Breast Cancer Research. (more…)
University of Missouri’s Sergei Kopeikin may have solved the Pioneer anomaly
COLUMBIA, Mo. – Former President Bill Clinton recently expressed his support for interstellar travel at the 100 Year Spaceship Symposium, an international event advocating for human expansion into other star systems. Interstellar travel will depend upon extremely precise measurements of every factor involved in the mission. The knowledge of those factors may be improved by the solution a University of Missouri researcher found to a puzzle that has stumped astrophysicists for decades.
“The Pioneer spacecraft, two probes launched into space in the early 70s, seemed to violate the Newtonian law of gravity by decelerating anomalously as they traveled, but there was nothing in physics to explain why this happened,” said Sergei Kopeikin, professor of physics and astronomy in MU’s College of Arts and Science. “My study suggests that this so-called Pioneer anomaly was not anything strange. The confusion can be explained by the effect of the expansion of the universe on the movement of photons that make up light and radio waves.” (more…)
EAST LANSING, Mich. — In a society where people text rather than talk and eat out more than cook, community has been lost and necessities replaced by wants, says a group of Michigan State University students who recently released a documentary of their monthlong experiment in living with less. (more…)
EAST LANSING, Mich. — American students need a dramatically new approach to improve how they learn science, says a noted group of scientists and educators led by Michigan State University professor William Schmidt.
After six years of work, the group has proposed a solution. The 8+1 Science concept calls for a radical overhaul in K-12 schools that moves away from memorizing scientific facts and focuses on helping students understand eight fundamental science concepts. The “plus one” is the importance of inquiry, the practice of asking why things happen around us – and a fundamental part of science. (more…)
While the majority of dating websites do a good job of managing the privacy of their users, a class research project at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Leeds School of Business found that 21 of 90 dating websites the class examined did not properly remove location data from pictures uploaded by their users.
As a result of people taking more photographs with cameras and cell phones containing Global Positioning System chips, some dating website profile pictures contain GPS coordinates showing where a picture was taken, said Associate Professor Kai Larsen, who taught the class on Privacy in the Age of Facebook. When such information is not removed by the dating website, commonly available tools can be used to detect the location of a person’s residence or other locations frequented by the user. (more…)
