Dishonesty may be more widespread in the animal kingdom than previously thought. A team of Australian ecologists has discovered that some male fiddler crabs "lie" about their fighting ability by growing claws that look strong and powerful but are in fact weak and puny. Published this week in the British Ecological Society's journal Functional Ecology, the study is the first direct evidence that crabs "bluff" about their fighting ability.
Culture
Every day 85 Americans die by suicide and hundreds of thousands more make attempts every year. The vast majority of recent studies on suicide have focused on identifying psychiatric risk factors. However, a new study by Temple University Sociology Professor Matt Wray, published online this month in Social Science and Medicine, explores time and place as factors in suicide by closely analyzing the patterns of suicide in a single geographic area—Las Vegas—over a 30 year period.
It is well known that plants growing under unfavourable conditions are generally smaller than those growing in stress-free conditions: indeed it is estimated that in the US, abiotic stress reduces the yield of agricultural crops by an average of 22%. A spectacular example of the effect of stress – in this case, repeated wounding – on plant growth is given by bonsai trees, in which every aspect of their stature, including height, girth, and size of leaves, is uniformly reduced to as little as 5% of that of their untreated sister trees.
The well-documented worldwide decline in the number of bees and other pollinators is not, at this stage, limiting global crop yields, according to the results of an international study published in the latest edition of the respected science journal, Current Biology.
Co-author, CSIRO Entomology's Dr Saul Cunningham, says however that the study detected warning signs that demand for pollinators is still growing and some highly pollinator-dependant crops are suffering.
Exposure to prolonged temperature elevation reduces antifungal activity of a contact lens solution that was implicated in the epidemic of the eye infection Fusarium keratitis that occurred between 2004 and 2006, according to a report in the November issue of Archives of Ophthalmology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
Setting sail on the Pacific, a University of Delaware-led research team has embarked on an extreme adventure that will find several of its members plunging deep into the sea to study hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor.
The team, which will be conducting research in environments that include scalding heat, high pressure, toxic chemicals and total darkness, is part of the National Science Foundation-funded "Extreme 2008: A Deep-Sea Adventure."
Researchers at Cornell University recently made a major breakthrough when they invented a method to test and demonstrate a long-held hypothesis that some very, very small metal particles work much better than others in various chemical processes such as converting chemical energy to electricity in fuel cells or reducing automobile pollution.
HOBOKEN , N.J. – Victoria Petite '09, a Stevens Institute of Technology Art & Technology major, was invited to give a presentation at the annual International Digital Media and Arts Association (iDMAa) conference on her Technogenesis Summer Scholars research project, conducted this past summer with Professor H. Quynh Dinh and Professor Ebon Fisher. The conference was hosted in Savannah, Georgia, by the Savannah College of Art and Design, November 5-8.
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Ethanol helped drive two years of record profits for grain farmers, but also will hold income down during a looming recession that has already sliced crop prices in half, a University of Illinois economist says.
Scott Irwin says agriculture's fortunes are now tethered more to ethanol than food, making crop growers vulnerable to sharp price swings at filling stations rather than the typically slower cost shifts at grocery stores.
Colugos (aka flying lemurs)—the closest living relatives of primates most notable for their ability to glide from tree to tree over considerable distances—are more diverse than had previously been believed, according to a new report published in the November 11th issue of Current Biology, a Cell Press publication.
Primates are most familiarly represented by monkeys and apes, the group including humans.
Researchers at the University of Toronto and the University of California, San Francisco, have revealed new hope for HIV treatment with the discovery of a way to 'rescue' immune cells that are exhausted from fighting off HIV infection.
Jakarta/Potsdam, 11.11.2008 - The newly implemented Tsunami Early Warning System for the Indian Ocean, GITEWS, goes into operation today and with this, the system enters its final phase of optimisation. As foreseen, the system was officially handed over to the BMKG (Meteorological, Climatology and Geophysical Agency of Indonesia) by the President of Indonesia, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, in the Indonesian capital Jakarta, slightly less than four years after the catastrophe of 2004.
It is commonly known that racing cars and bicyclists can reduce air resistance by following closely behind a leader, but researchers from New York University and Cornell University have found the opposite is true with flapping objects, such as flags. Their study, published in the most recent issue of the journal Physical Review Letters, discovered that in a series of flags, the leading flag faces significantly less resistance than do succeeding flags. The finding may alter our understanding of how living flapping creatures, such as birds or fish, move through the air and water.
Passengers check in their suitcases, which are automatically transported away by conveyer belts; moving walkways and escalators run for hours without a break – thousands of gear units rattle away at the major airports. The power consumption is tremendous, in the range of several gigawatt hours per annum. A substantial amount of this is lost through friction. In wind turbines and in cars, too, a percentage of the energy is spent on friction – reducing the efficiency factor accordingly. Novel lubricants that almost eliminate the effect of friction could be the answer.