Researchers may have found the key to engineering plants capable of thriving in environments laden with toxic aluminum, according to a report published online on October 2nd in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication. Aluminum (Al)—a metal that is generally plentiful in the earth's crust—causes particular problems for farmers in South America, Africa, and Indonesia, where acidic environments turn the metal into a form that stunts the growth of plants and especially plant roots.
Culture
Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Colorado School of Mines (CSM) have developed a prototype sensor that quickly detects very small amounts of hydrogen accumulation in coated pipeline steel. The new sensor could provide early warning of pipes that have accumulated excessive amounts of hydrogen—a notorious source of embrittlement—and avert potentially disastrous failures of pipelines carrying hydrogen fuel.
Blogs allow African Americans to discuss HIV and AIDS in an unfiltered way that is both public and private, according to a Penn State researcher, and this exploration may lead to another way to distribute health messages to the African American community.
Lynette Kvasny, associate professor of information sciences and technology (IST), an avid blog reader, noticed an interesting conversation on a blog following an August 2006 ABC News story, "Out of Control: AIDS in Black America."
Tirol, Austria – October 1, 2008 – According to the asymmetry principle of trust, information on negative events decreases trust to a much higher extent than information on positive events increases trust. A new study in the journal Risk Analysis examined whether this notion holds true with respect to trust in the safety of tourist destinations. Results show that proper safety measures have at least the same or higher impact on trust in the perceived safety of a tourist destination than the absence of such measures has on distrust.
Annville, PA – October 2, 2008 – A new study in the journal Politics & Policy shows how there is greater diversity of foreign policy beliefs held by elite opinion leaders than previously thought and identifies nine foreign policy orientations.
Chris J. Dolan, Ph.D., of Lebanon Valley College used a content analysis of national opinion and foreign policy journals between 1992 and 2004 to identify and detail nine foreign policy orientations held by elite opinion leaders.
Chapel Hill, N.C. – October 2, 2008 – When consumers hold private information about their tastes, companies can use nonlinear pricing as a screening mechanism to induce different types of customers to buy different products. Screening incentives may lead a firm to make a small version of its product "too small" in order to collect more profit from consumers who purchase the larger version. A study in the RAND Journal of Economics shows that firms distort the products.
Los Angeles, CA – October 2, 2008 – A new study in the Journal of School Health reveals that cyberbullying is common among teens who are frequent internet users, with 72 percent of respondents reporting at least one incident during the past year.
COLUMBIA, Mo. – It's all fun and games when it comes to the current trend in online advertising. Advergames, online video games used to advertise a product or brand, increasingly are being used by advertisers to attract and engage consumers. In a new study, University of Missouri researchers examined the impact of advergame themes on consumers' attitudes toward advergames and brands. The study revealed that consumers expressed strong positive relationships toward brands when they played advergames with strong thematic connections to the brands.
Boulder, CO USA -- Paleontologist Sankar Chatterjee of Texas Tech University, aeronautical engineer Rick Lind of the University of Florida, and their students Andy Gedeon and Brian Roberts have reached back in time 115 million years to one of the most successful flying creatures in Earth's history, the pterodactyl, to conjure a robotic spy plane with next-generation capabilities.
ANN ARBOR, Mich.---A satellite about the size of a loaf of bread will be designed and built at the University of Michigan and deployed to study space weather, thanks to a new grant from the National Science Foundation.
Undergraduate and graduate students will be heavily involved in this Radio Aurora Explorer (RAX) project, led by the University of Michigan and SRI International, a California-based independent research and technology development organization.
Boulder, CO, USA -- The connection between geology and the history of the Civil War has fascinated Robert Whisonant since his undergraduate days, and now Whisonant has teamed up with geomorphologist Judy Ehlen, both of Radford University, to take history, military history in particular, a step deeper -- into the geology beneath the soldiers' feet.
COLUMBIA, Mo. – After improving the sensitivity of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), researchers at the University of Missouri actually watched the HIV-1 protease mature from an inactive form into an active infection. This process has never been directly visualized before. The findings appear today in the journal Nature.
In the current Presidential campaign it has been said often enough to become a cliche: both candidates will need to reach beyond their respective political bases to appeal to a larger-than-usual body of independent voters.
How to do so? Accentuate the negative -- or "negational identity," as behavioral scholars put it.
It comes blasting out of the blue on your airplane flight: sudden bumpiness and sometimes even a violent plummeting. It arrives without warning, and it can be more than frightening, since it causes tens of millions of dollars in injury claims every year.
It's called clear air turbulence (CAT), and a new forecasting method, published today in the Journal of Atmospheric Sciences and led by a researcher at the University of Georgia, could help pilots chart new courses around these patches of rough but clear air that can turn an otherwise unremarkable flight into a nightmare.
A team of Yale scientists has found that certain countries and some U.S. states stand to benefit from the use of compact fluorescent lighting more than others in the fight against global warming. Some places may even produce more mercury emissions by switching from incandescent light bulbs to compact fluorescent lighting.
The study, which appears online October 1 in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, looked at all 50 states and 130 countries to determine the impact of fluorescent lighting on total mercury emissions in those regions.