Monthly Archives: August 2010

Sun + Plastic Sheet = Energy

By admin | Published: August 31, 2010
Researchers from the University of Cambridge have developed a major improvement for organic solar cells, reporting their results in the current issue of Applied Physics Letters. Organic solar cells have significant advantages over conventional solar cells: they have a low impact on the environment, manufacturing is cheap and because they based on flexible plastic sheets [...]
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Nourishing the ageing brain

By admin | Published: August 26, 2010
Research findings suggest new links between B vitamin deficiency and the degeneration of the ageing brain. The Californian Sacramento Area Latino Study on Aging (SALSA), involving nearly 1,800 Hispanic volunteers aged 60 to 101, has investigated the specific effect of B vitamins on brain degeneration since 1996. According to U.S. Department of Agriculture nutritionist Lindsay [...]
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Earliest Animals Discovered

By admin | Published: August 23, 2010
Princeton University geoscientists have discovered what they believe to be the earliest body-fossil evidence of animal life. Fossils have been found in a rock formation in Southern Australia that are believed to be the calcified remains of millimetre- to centimetre-sized sponge-like marine creatures. Because the fossils were found below strata from the Marinoan glaciation, the [...]
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Species in the Soil

By admin | Published: August 15, 2010
  Research in the Panamanian rainforest shows that soil-dwelling organisms promote local species richness and keep the rare trees rare. A single hectare of the Amazonian rainforest may be home to several hundred species of tree, and because trees are at the centre of ecological communities, their diversity translates to variety in the organisms they [...]
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Carbonate rocks and life on Mars?

By admin | Published: August 10, 2010
Scientists writing in Earth and Planetary Science Letters have reported new evidence for the existence of carbonate rocks on Mars. These carbonates provide a possible link to the presence of living organisms on Mars around 4 billion years ago. Researchers analysed images of the Martian surface that were recorded by the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer [...]
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Culture: Shaping the brain

By admin | Published: August 9, 2010
Psychological scientists have reported growing evidence that different cultures can have a marked effect on fundamental brain function and structure. Denise C. Park and Chih-Mao Huang have reported growing evidence that cultural difference between Westerners and East Asians has led to differences in attention, categorisation and reasoning through effect on neural function and neuroanatomy. Facial [...]
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Disease and the dysfunctions of metabolism

By admin | Published: August 9, 2010
Researchers at Harvard and Boston University have found that the different pathways of the human metabolic network interact and induce deep epistasis, the suppression of a mutation by one or more seemingly unrelated genes. Genome sequences alone apparently don’t say much. While the Human Genome Project revealed the order of letters that make up the [...]
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