Culture | Page 2863 | Science Codex

Immigrant children from poor countries academically outperform those from developed countries

WASHINGTON, DC — Immigrants who seek a better life in Western countries may not be able to escape the influence of their home country when it comes to their children's academic performance, according to findings from the October issue of the American Sociological Review.

Sociologists Mark Levels, Jaap Dronkers and Gerbert Kraaykamp find that large-scale influences such as country of origin, destination country and immigrant community play a role in educational outcomes for immigrant children in their host country.

New meat-eating dinosaur from Argentina had bird-like breathing system

MENDOZA, Argentina—The remains of a new 10-meter-long predatory dinosaur discovered along the banks of Argentina's Rio Colorado is helping to unravel how birds evolved their unusual breathing system.

New formula predicts how people will migrate in coming decades

Nearly 200 million people now live outside their country of birth. But the patterns of migration that got them there have proven difficult to project. Now scientists at Rockefeller University, with assistance from the United Nations, have developed a predictive model of worldwide population shifts that they say will provide better estimates of migration across international boundaries.

Meat-eating dinosaur from Argentina had bird-like breathing system

ANN ARBOR, Mich.--The remains of a 30-foot-long predatory dinosaur discovered along the banks of Argentina's Rio Colorado is helping to unravel how birds evolved their unusual breathing system.

University of Michigan paleontologist Jeffrey Wilson was part of the team that made the discovery, to be published Sept. 29 in the online journal Public Library of Science ONE and announced at a news conference in Mendoza, Argentina.

The discovery of this dinosaur builds on decades of paleontological research indicating that birds evolved from dinosaurs.

Before the big bang?

Sir Roger Penrose, prominent lecturer and author, as well as highly distinguished mathematician and theoretical physicist, will give Perimeter Institute's next public lecture on Wednesday, October 1.

There is now a great deal of evidence confirming the existence of a very hot and dense early stage of the universe. Much of this data comes from a detailed study of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) - radiation from the early universe that was most recently measured by NASA's WMAP satellite.

Ethnic conflict stoked by government economic intervention, not globalization

Economic globalization and liberalization have been blamed for numerous social ills over the last two decades, including a sharp rise in interethnic violence in countries all over the world. Not so, say the results of a study conducted by researchers from McGill University and published in the current issue of the journal International Studies Quarterly.

MU expert looks back to debate 1 and forward to the vice presidential debate

COLUMBIA, Mo. – The 2008 presidential campaign has been running for a very long time, but we have now entered another phase with the commencement of the debates. Friday night saw the first presidential debate of 2008, between John McCain and Barack Obama. Content analysis, by a University of Missouri expert in campaigns, reveals that most of the statements in this debate were positive (53 percent), followed by attacks (39 percent) and defenses (9 percent).

UI researchers find potentially toxic substance present in Chicago air

Although the industrial compounds known as polychlorinated biphenols or PCBs have been found in previous air samples collected in the city of Chicago, a University of Iowa researcher says that a new study of Chicago air sampled between November 2006 and November 2007 found PCB11, a byproduct of the manufacture of paint pigments and a potentially toxic substance, present throughout the city.

Engineer: Head-first slide is quicker

Base running and base stealing would seem to be arts driven solely by a runner's speed, but there's more than mere gristle, bone and lung power to this facet of baseball ¬– there are lots of mathematics and physics at play.

With baseball playoffs heating up and the World Series right around the corner, it's guaranteed that fans will see daring slides, both feet-first and head -first, and even slides on bang-bang plays at first.

Who gets there faster, the head-first slider or the feet-first?

Wetlands restoration not a panacea for Louisiana coast

Boulder, CO, USA – Counting on wetlands restoration projects to protect storm buffeted infrastructure along the Louisiana Coast is likely to be a "losing battle" that provides "false hope" and prevents endangered communities from clearly planning for their future, says a researcher from Western Carolina University (WCU).

Expanding communities mean less green space

Efforts to retain the landscape were recorded from the Bloemendaler polder, the Hoekse Waard, the Mastenbroek polder, Moerdijk and Vleuten-De Meern in order to determine the systemic obstacles encountered. Van Dijk found that it was not the formal system of regional planning (the laws and regulations) that determined whether concerned citizens were successful in their opposition to urbanisation. Instead, the political system is the filter that determines whether concerns about the landscape can lead to the abandonment of proposed urbanisation projects.

Foam reactor is 10 times more energy efficient

In this project, Charl Stemmet investigated a new, structured support for catalysts for use in gas-liquid reactors. He used a highly porous solid foam as the support material, having up to 97% open space available and a very large surface area per reactor volume. This large surface area is important for mass-transfer-limited, gas-liquid reactions; the larger the surface area, the greater the production per unit reactor volume.

Reactor design

Good research, low costs

In the design phase of an intervention study, the first issue to be decided is how to assign people to different experimental groups. There are two groups in studies such as the model example above: the intervention group and the control group. One option is to assign whole schools to a particular group, so that all pupils from the same school experience the same conditions. Another option is to assign the pupils from each school to different groups so that each group is represented at each school.

Don't blame cities for climate change, see them as solutions

Cities are being unfairly blamed for most of humanity's greenhouse gas emissions and this threatens efforts to tackle climate change, warns a study in the October 2008 issue of the journal Environment and Urbanization.

The paper says cities are often blamed for 75 to 80 percent of emissions, but that the true value is closer to 40 percent. It adds that the potential for cities to help address climate change is being overlooked because of this error.

100 million years AD

Jan Zalasiewicz, a lecturer in geology at the University of Leicester, has published a new study looking at the lasting impression made by mankind -100 million years hence.

He takes the perspective of alien explorers arriving on earth - their geologists study the layers of rock, using the many clues to piece together its history over several billion years