Caffeine can help those working shifts or nights to make fewer errors, according to a new study by Cochrane researchers. The findings have implications for health workers and for any industry relying on shift or night work, such as transportation.
Earth
To most people in the southwestern U.S., the April 4 El Mayor-Cucapah earthquake felt like a rocking of the ground. But on a group of inch-long fish that exist nowhere else on Earth outside of "Devils Hole," a crack in the ground in Nevada's Mojave Desert, it unleashed a veritable tsunami.
LA JOLLA, Calif. – Scientists from NOAA's Southwest Fisheries Science Center placed 61 satellite tags on fur seals, leopard seals, Weddell seals, chinstrap penguins and gentoo penguins that will allow researchers and the public to track the movements of these animals over the austral winter, which takes place during our summer.
CSI notwithstanding, forensics experts cannot always retrieve fingerprints from objects, but a conformal coating process developed by Penn State professors can reveal hard-to-develop fingerprints on nonporous surfaces without altering the chemistry of the print.
"As prints dry or age, the common techniques used to develop latent fingerprints, such as dusting or cyanoacrylate -- SuperGlue -- fuming often fail," said Robert Shaler, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology and director of Penn State's forensic sciences program.
Scientists have identified an unusual species of pathogenic algae that causes human skin infections, described in a new study in the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology. The finding should improve our understanding of how rare species of algae are sometimes able to cause serious disease in humans and animals.
Proton pump inhibitors, medications that suppress acid in the stomach, appear to be associated with fractures in postmenopausal women and bacterial infections in many patients, and higher doses do not appear any more beneficial for treating bleeding ulcers, according to a series of reports in the May 10 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. An additional report finds that introducing guidelines for proton pump inhibitor use into clinical settings may reduce rates of inappropriate prescriptions.
PITTSBURGH – Technology for capturing carbon dioxide and safely storing it underground rather than releasing it to the atmosphere holds significant promise in the U.S. and abroad, according to researchers at the Ninth Annual Conference on Carbon Capture and Sequestration. Researchers from the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington will discuss results from several lines of work: an assessment of where and when carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology might be deployed within the U.S.
Washington, D.C. — The evolution of complex life forms may have gotten a jump start billions of years ago, when geologic events operating over millions of years caused large quantities of phosphorus to wash into the oceans. According to this model, the higher levels of phosphorus would have caused vast algal blooms, pumping extra oxygen into the environment which allowed larger, more complex types of organisms to thrive.
Some people have streets named after them. Warren Piers, a chemistry professor at the University of Calgary, has a catalyst penned after him.
During the yearly General Assembly of the European Geological Union in Vienna, Austria. Dr. Olaf Eisen from the German Alfred Wegener Institute is presenting results from an environmentally friendly measurement method that he and his colleagues used on an Antarctic ice-shelf for the first time in early 2010.
New eruptions from Iceland's Eyjafjallajoekull volcano have produced a 1600 km-wide ash cloud over the Atlantic. The brownish plume, travelling east and then south, is clearly visible in stark contrast to white clouds framing this Envisat image from 6 May.
ANN ARBOR, Mich.---In an achievement that could help enable fast quantum computers, University of Michigan physicists have built a better Rydberg atom trap. Rydberg atoms are highly excited, nearly-ionized giants that can be thousands of times larger than their ground-state counterparts.
LIVERMORE, Calif. - Just a few years ago, Dan Farber happened to be doing field work in Peru with students when the 8.0 Pisco earthquake struck. As a scientist working in the active tectonics of the Peruvian Andes - funded through the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics - Farber was asked by colleagues if he could participate in a rapid response team to map the damage of the seismic deformation and install a system of geodetic stations.
The wavy lines and squiggles etched into a slab of limestone found near Fossil Butte National Monument are prehistoric fish trails, made by Notogoneus osculus as it fed along a lake bottom, says Emory University paleontologist Anthony Martin.