(Kingston, ON) -- An international team of astronomers, including Queen's University physicist Larry Widrow, have uncovered evidence of a nearby cosmic encounter. Their study indicates that the Andromeda and Triangulum galaxies, the two galaxies closest to our own, collided about two to three billion years ago.
Heavens
Leipzig: The long-term effects of pesticides on living organisms in rivers and on water quality can now be assessed more easily. Researchers from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) have developed a tool that can estimate the harmful effect of pesticides, such as those flushed into rivers and streams from agricultural land, within minutes. "It used to be very difficult to detect which chronic effects occur," explains Dr Matthias Liess, head of the UFZ's System Ecotoxicology Department.
This is one of the many new developments to be presented by four Fraunhofer Institutes at the TecWatch technology forum in Hall 5.3.
There is one striking fact about rush-hour traffic – vehicles on the commuter routes tend to be occupied by just one person, even though motoring costs are continually rising. The OpenRide mobile ridesharing service currently being developed by researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems FOKUS will remedy this situation by organizing ridesharing opportunities spontaneously and conveniently. This will not only save costs but also help the environment by reducing the amount of city traffic.
ESA's XMM-Newton orbiting X-ray telescope has uncovered a celestial Rosetta stone: the first close-up of a white dwarf star, circling a companion star, that could explode into a particular kind of supernova in a few million years. These supernovae are used as beacons to measure cosmic distances and ultimately understand the expansion of our Universe.
People who start nicotine replacement therapy at least four weeks before surgery can halve their risk of poor wound healing. This is what the German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) concludes in information published on informedhealthonline.org today.
Quitting smoking in times of stress is not easy
University of Hawaii astronomer Dr. Tomotsugu Goto and colleagues have discovered a giant galaxy surrounding the most distant black hole ever found. The galaxy, which is 12.8 billion light-years from Earth, is as large as the Milky Way galaxy and harbors a supermassive black hole that contains at least a billion times as much matter as does our sun.
Using one of the greatest sources of radiation energy created by man, University of Nevada, Reno researcher and faculty member Roberto Mancini is studying ultra-high temperature and non-equilibrium plasmas to mimic what happens to matter in accretion disks around black holes.
Researchers from the University of Georgia have just shown that one component of interstellar clouds emitting unusual infrared light known as the Unidentified Infrared Bands (UIRs) is a gaseous version of naphthalene, the chief component of mothballs back on Earth. The UIRs have been seen by astronomers for more than 30 years, but no one has ever identified what specific molecules cause these patterns.
As NGC 4945 is only about 13 million light-years away in the constellation of Centaurus (the Centaur), a modest telescope is sufficient for stargazers to spot this remarkable galaxy. NGC 4945's designation comes from its entry number in the New General Catalogue compiled by the Danish–Irish astronomer John Louis Emil Dreyer in the 1880s. James Dunlop, a Scottish astronomer, is credited with originally discovering NGC 4945 in 1826 from Australia.
Scientists using a continent-wide array of radio telescopes have made an extremely precise measurement of the curvature of space caused by the Sun's gravity, and their technique promises a major contribution to a frontier area of basic physics.
Bethesda, MD (Sept. 1, 2009) — Sexual impairment is common among men with chronic hepatitis C undergoing antiviral therapy, according to a new study in Gastroenterology, the official journal of the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) Institute.
As scientists attempt to learn more about how galaxies evolve, an open question has been whether collisions with our dwarf galactic neighbors will one day tear apart the disk of the Milky Way.
While astronomers know that such collisions have probably occurred in the past, the new computer simulations show that instead of destroying a galaxy, these collisions "puff up" a galactic disk, particularly around the edges, and produce structures called stellar rings.
Barcelona, Spain, 30 August 2009: Smoking still kills more men than women, because men started smoking substantial numbers of cigarettes long before women did. But, because so many men have now quit, male death rates from smoking are decreasing in many European countries where female death rates from smoking are still increasing. Taking men and women together, smoking causes about 0.7 million deaths per year in the 27 countries of the present European Union, including 0.3 million deaths per year before age 70 (more than one of five of all deaths before age 70).
Researchers at the University of Warwick have found what could be the signal of ideal wave "surfing" conditions for individual particles within the massive turbulent ocean of the solar wind. The discovery could give a new insight into just how energy is dissipated in solar system sized plasmas such as the solar wind and could provide significant clues to scientists developing fusion power which relies on plasmas.