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Walk this way? Masculine motion seems to come at you, while females walk away

You can tell a lot about people from the way they move alone: their gender, age, and even their mood, earlier studies have shown. Now, researchers reporting in the September 9th issue of Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, have found that observers perceive masculine motion as coming toward them, while a characteristically feminine walk looks like it's headed the other way.

Such studies are done by illuminating only the joints of model walkers and asking observers to identify various characteristics about the largely ambiguous figures.

Space: The not-so-final frontier

Of all environments, space must be the most hostile: It is freezing cold, close to absolute zero, there is a vacuum, so no oxygen, and the amount of lethal radiation from stars is very high. This is why humans need to be carefully protected when they enter this environment. New research by Ingemar Jönsson and colleagues published in the September 9 issue of Current Biology, a Cell Press journal, shows that some animals —the so-called tardigrades or 'water-bears'— are able to do away with space suits and can survive exposure to open-space vacuum, cold and radiation.

Study finds previously deported immigrants more likely to be rearrested after leaving jail

Deportable immigrants who previously have been expelled from the United States are more likely to be rearrested on suspicion of committing a crime after they are released from jail than other deportable immigrants without the prior history of expulsion, according to a new RAND Corporation study.

Rail, road or waterway?

Golden rods

Gold nanoparticles are under consideration for a number of biomedical applications, such as tumor treatment. A German-American research team at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Hunter College in New York, and the RWTH Aachen has now developed a new method for the production of nanoscopic gold rods. In contrast to previous methods, they have achieved this without the use of cytotoxic additives. As they report in the journal Angewandte Chemie, the synthesis is not carried out in water, but in an ionic liquid, a "liquid salt".

Scientists develop model to map continental margins

Scientists at the University of Liverpool have developed a new exploration method to assist the oil and gas industry in identifying more precisely where the oceans and continents meet.

Geophysicists at Liverpool have produced a mathematical technique to process satellite data that can map the thickness of the Earth's crust under the oceans in order to locate where the continents meet oceanic crust. The technique has been used to measure the crustal thickness of areas such as the South Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic to identify new areas for oil and gas reserves.

Dirty air brings rain -- then again, maybe not

An international team of scientists, headed by Prof. Daniel Rosenfeld of the Institute of Earth Sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has come up with a surprising finding to the disputed issue of whether air pollution increases or decreases rainfall. The conclusion: both can be true, depending on local environmental conditions.

The determination of this issue is one with significant consequences in an era of climate change and specifically in areas suffering from manmade pollution and water shortages, including Israel.

International experts collect alpine fungi in Beartooth Mountains of Montana

BOZEMAN, Mont. -- Armed guards once kept polar bears away while Cathy Cripps collected mushrooms and fungi on the island of Svalbard between Norway and the North Pole. Another time, Cripps encountered musk-oxen while gathering fungi in Greenland.

It's no wonder, then, that some of the world's top experts on fungi asked if they would face grizzly bears in Montana, said Cripps, a Montana State University mycologist who hosted a recent International Symposium on Arctic-Alpine Mycology. Cripps is president of ISAM and curator of the MSU fungi collection.

Living sensor can warn of arsenic pollution

Scientists studying arsenic pollution have discovered a living sensor that can spot contamination. They have also discovered new bacteria that can clean up arsenic spills even in previously untreatable cold areas, microbiologists heard today (Monday 8 September 2008) at the Society for General Microbiology's Autumn meeting being held this week at Trinity College, Dublin.

The Giant Mine in Canada is in the sub-arctic. It contains over 230,000 tonnes of arsenic-containing dust, making it one of the most polluted places on Earth as well as one of the most inhospitable.

Hurricane Gustav

The development and path of Hurricane Gustav is shown via a sequence of satellite images acquired by Envisat's Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) instrument on 25 August, 28 August, 30 August and 1 September 2008 (from right to left).

Gustav formed on 25 August 2008 some 400 km southeast of Port-au-Prince, Haiti (seen above far right image), when a tropical wave developed curved bands and an upper level eye feature (visible), causing the U.S. National Hurricane Center to designate it Tropical Depression Seven.

Disruption-free videos

Standardized video coding techniques still have their snags -- digitally transmitted images are not always disruption-free. An extension of the H.264/AVC coding format allows to protect the most important data packets to ensure they arrive safely at the receiver.

Fingerprint find in decade-old double murder probe

A decade old US double murder probe has received a new breakthrough following investigations by a University of Leicester forensic scientist at Northamptonshire Police.

Dr John Bond, Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Leicester Forensic Research Centre and Scientific Support Manager at Northamptonshire Police, revealed today that he found fingerprints on bullet shell casings fired at the crime scene in 1999.

The casings had been brought to Dr Bond by US detective Christopher King in a bid to shed new light on the investigation.

Child safety seats and lap-and-shoulder belts effective in preventing serious injury

Chicago, IL – September 4, 2008 – For young children, all states currently require the use of child safety seats, and the minimum age and weight requirements to graduate to seat belts has been increasing over time. A new study in the journal Economic Inquiry reveals that lap-and-shoulder seat belts perform as well as child safety seats in preventing serious injury. However, safety seats tend to be better at reducing less serious injuries.

Digitized student

A researcher on a short trip to a foreign country, with little money, but a digital camera in hand has devised a novel approach to digitizing foreign archives that could speed up research.

Caught in a trap: bumblebees vs. robotic crab spiders

Bumblebees learn to avoid camouflaged predators by sacrificing foraging speed for predator detection, according to scientists from Queen Mary, University of London.

One of the bumblebee's main predators is the crab spider. Crab spiders hunt pollinating insects like bees and butterflies by lying in wait on flowers, and are particularly difficult for their prey to spot because they can change their colour to blend in with their surroundings.