When a team of researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Colorado Boulder’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences raced to the scene of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill to assess the disaster’s impact on air quality last year, they found more than they expected. (more…)
RESTON, VA, March 11, 2011 – 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 February with 65.4 percent of searches conducted.
U.S. Explicit Core Search
Google Sites led the U.S. explicit core search market in February with 65.4 percent market share, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 16.1 percent and Microsoft sites with 13.6 percent (up 0.5 percentage points). Ask Network accounted for 3.2 percent of explicit core searches, followed by AOL, Inc. with 1.7 percent. (more…)
A polite act shows respect. But a new study of a common etiquette—holding a door for someone—suggests that courtesy may have a more practical, though unconscious, shared motivation: to reduce the work for those involved. The research, by Joseph P. Santamaria and David A. Rosenbaum of Pennsylvania State University, is the first to combine two fields of study ordinarily considered unrelated: altruism and motor control. It is to be published in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
“The way etiquette has been viewed by Emily Post—that you’re being proper by following social codes—is undoubtedly part of it,” said psychology professor Rosenbaum. “Our insight is there is another contributor: the mental representation of other people’s physical effort. Substantial research in the field of motor control shows that people are good at estimating how much effort they and others expend,” Rosenbaum continued. “We realized that this concept could be extended to a shared-effort model of politeness.” (more…)
NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has nearly completed its three-month examination of a crater informally named “Santa Maria,” but before the rover resumes its overland trek, an orbiting camera has provided a color image of Opportunity beside Santa Maria.
The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter acquired the image on March 1, while Opportunity was extending its robotic arm to take close-up photos of a rock called “Ruiz Garcia.” From orbit, the tracks Opportunity made as it approached the crater from the west are clearly visible. Santa Maria crater is about 90 meters (295 feet) in diameter. (more…)
Researchers at the Hawai‘i Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB), an organized research unit in the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa’s School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology have made a remarkable new discovery. (more…)
The government of Japan has provided a report about the damage caused by a strong earthquake which rocked the north-east of the country on Friday, March 11. The Associated Press reports with reference to Japanese television that the tsunami wave, triggered by the quake, caused significant destruction in the northern part of the country.
The magnitude of the earthquake, which took place in Japan on Friday, was measured 8.8 on Richter scale. Quakes still continue in the capital, Tokyo. The epicenter of the quake was located 382 kilometers to the north-east off Tokyo, at the depth of 10 kilometers. (more…)
WASHINGTON — The deadly Russian heat wave of 2010 was due to a natural atmospheric phenomenon often associated with weather extremes, according to a new study. And while the scientists could not attribute the intensity of this particular heat wave to climate change, they found that extreme heat waves are likely to become increasingly frequent in the region in coming decades. (more…)
The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) may possess the secret to baking perfect buns every time. Its researchers have developed a production-line system that automatically inspects the quality of sandwich buns exiting the oven and adjusts oven temperatures if it detects unacceptable buns.
“We have closed the loop between the quality inspection of buns and the oven controls to meet the specifications required by food service and fast food customers,” said GTRI senior research engineer Douglas Britton. “By creating a more accurate, uniform and faster assessment process, we are able to minimize waste and lost product.” (more…)
