A team of scientists announced today confirmation of a link between massive volcanic eruptions along the east coast of Greenland and in the western British Isles about 55 million years ago and a period of global warming that raised sea surface temperatures by five degrees (Celsius) in the tropics and more than six degrees in the Arctic.
The findings were reported in this week's edition of Science.
A large retail chain had a problem. It sold three similar power drills: one for about $90, a purportedly better one at $120 and a top-tier one at $130. The higher the price, the more the store profited. But while drill know-it-alls flocked to the $130 model and price-fretters grabbed its $90 cousin, shoppers often ignored the middle one. So the store sought advice from a new breed of "price-optimization" software from DemandTec Inc. What followed offers us a clue about important shifts that technology is bringing to retail shopping.
After analyzing an array of variables, including sales history and competitors' prices, the software suggested cutting the middle drill to $110.
That might have made the top drill seem more expensive. But drill aficionados still were fine shelling out $130. Sales of that drill didn't change. However, now that the $90 version seemed less of a bargain, the store sold 4 percent fewer low-end drills -- and 11 percent more of the mid-range model. Profits rose.
AFPSun, 29 Apr 2007 23:23 UTC
Japanese chemists have devised a gel that swells up to 500 times its size when in contact with solvents, an invention hailed as a breakthrough for absorbing dangerous industrial spills.
SAN JOSE, Calif. - A convincing twin of Darth Vader stalks the beige cubicles of a Silicon Valley office, complete with ominous black mask, cape and light saber.
Vitamin C is possibly the most important small molecule whose biosynthetic pathway remained a mystery. That is until now.
A group of Dartmouth and UCLA researchers, who normally work on genes involved in aging and cancer in animals, discovered the last piece of the puzzle, they report in a study published online April 26 in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.
Dr. Steven Clarke of the UCLA Molecular Biology Institute and the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry explains, "We were working on an interesting gene in worms." One insight led to another until, "We uncovered the last unknown enzyme in the synthesis of vitamin C in plants," said Dr. Charles Brenner of Dartmouth Medical School's Norris Cotton Cancer Center and Department of Genetics.
An essential vitamin for people, vitamin C is well known as an antioxidant and enzyme cofactor. Humans lost the ability to make vitamin C and need to take it up from dietary sources, particularly from plants.
Only in 1998 was a biosynthetic pathway proposed to explain how plants make vitamin C. Research since then has confirmed much of the pathway, although the gene responsible for the seventh step of the proposed 10-step pathway from glucose to vitamin C remained unknown.
Carbon dixoide consumed before it sinks in deep ocean may re-enter atmosphere as greenhouse gas
A major study sheds new light on the role of carbon dioxide once it's transported to the oceans' depths. The research indicates that instead of sinking, carbon dioxide is often consumed by animals and bacteria and recycled in the "twilight zone," a dimly lit area 100 to 1,000 meters below the surface. Because the carbon often never reaches the deep ocean, where it can be stored and prevented from re-entering the atmosphere as a green-house gas, the oceans may have little impact on changes in the atmosphere or climate.
The research is the result of two international expeditions to the Pacific Ocean, and is published in the April 27, 2007, issue of Science.
"These results are particularly important to our efforts today to improve the predictive capacity of numerical models that relate ocean carbon to global climate change on different time scales," said Don Rice, director of NSF's chemical oceanography program.
It also adds a new wrinkle to proposals to mitigate climate change by fertilizing the oceans with iron--to promote blooms of photosynthetic marine plants and transfer more carbon dioxide from the air to the deep ocean.
"The twilight zone is a critical link between the surface and the deep ocean," said Ken Buesseler, a biogeochemist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and lead author of the new study, which is co-authored by 17 other scientists. "We're interested in what happens in the twilight zone, what sinks into it and what actually sinks out of it. Unless the carbon goes all the way down into the deep ocean and is stored there, the oceans will have little impact on climate change."
At first glance, the manuscript appears to be a medieval Christian prayer book.
But on the same pages as the prayers, experts using a high-tech imaging system have discovered commentary likely written in the third century A.D. on a work written around 350 B.C. by the Greek philosopher Aristotle.
The discovery is the third ancient text to emerge from the layers of writing on the much reused pages. In 2002 researchers had uncovered writings by the mathematician Archimedes and the fourth-century B.C. politician Hyperides.
Last year one of the pages was found to contain a famous work by Archimedes about buoyancy that had previously been known only from an incomplete Latin translation.
Project director William Noel, curator of manuscripts at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, called the latest discovery a "sensational find."
The findings were presented today at a general meeting of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
The new planet is not much bigger than the Earth
Astronomers have found the most Earth-like planet outside our Solar System to date, a world which could have water running on its surface.
The planet orbits the faint star Gliese 581, which is 20.5 light-years away in the constellation Libra.
Scientists made the discovery using the Eso 3.6m Telescope in Chile.
They say the benign temperatures on the planet mean any water there could exist in liquid form, and this raises the chances it could also harbour life.
The wonders of astronomy meet the drama of modern art in this latest image from the Hubble Space Telescope.
The color-enhanced image, taken of the distant Carina Nebula, depicts the birth pangs of a dozen stars, as explosions send waves of superheated gases billowing through the southern constellation Carina.
The raucous stellar nursery makes a particularly fitting subject - scientists released the image today in honor of Hubble's anniversary, marking 17 years since the orbiting telescope was borne into space on the shuttle Discovery.
This painterly picture brings the total number of images that Hubble has taken since 1990 to nearly 500,000.
The peak of the next sunspot cycle will come in late 2011 or early 2012 - potentially affecting airline flights, communications satellites and electrical transmissions. But forecasters can't agree on how intense it will be.
A 12-member panel charged with forecasting the solar cycle said Wednesday it is evenly split over whether the peak will be 90 sunspots or 140 sunspots.
The government's Space Environment Center in Boulder, Colo., tracks space weather and forecasts its changes, which can affect millions of dollars worth of activities such as oil drilling, car navigation systems and astronauts.
Half of the specialists predicted a moderately strong cycle of 140 sunspots expected to peak in October of 2011, while the rest called for a moderately weak cycle of 90 sunspots peaking in August of 2012.
"We're hoping to achieve a consensus sometime in the next six to 12 months," said Douglas Biesecker, a space environment center scientist who is chairman of the forecast panel.
An average solar cycle ranges from 75 to 155 sunspots.
