Culture

Knee clicking can establish mating rights among antelopes. A study of eland antelopes, published in the open access journal BMC Biology, has uncovered the dominance displays used by males to settle disputes over access to fertile females, without resorting to genuine violence.

A unique fungus that makes diesel compounds has been discovered living in trees in the rainforest, according to a paper published in the November issue of Microbiology. The fungus is potentially a totally new source of green energy and scientists are now working to develop its fuel producing potential.

CORAL GABLES, FL (November 3, 2008)-While there is no agreement on the number of Jews in the United States, nor whether that number is increasing or decreasing, it probably matters little in the ability of American Jews to have their say in the political system, according to Ira M. Sheskin, University of Miami associate professor of Geography and Regional Studies and director of the Jewish Demography Project at the UM Sue and Leonard Miller Center for Contemporary Judaic Studies.

Two new studies conclude that a review which claimed that homeopathy is just a placebo, published in The Lancet, was seriously flawed.

BOCA RATON, Fla. -- Thursday, November 6, 2008, Dr. Kirt Rusenko, Marine Conservationist, and staff from Gumbo Limbo Nature Center in Boca Raton will release two juvenile loggerhead sea turtles raised in captivity into the Indian River Lagoon near Sebastian Inlet.

Irvine, Calif. — The fight against climate warming has an unexpected ally in mushrooms growing in dry spruce forests covering Alaska, Canada, Scandinavia and other northern regions, a new UC Irvine study finds.

A child runs across the street without paying attention to the traffic, just as a car approaches at speed. It's too late to slam on the brakes, and the driver can't swerve either, as there is another car on the neighboring lane. An accident seems inevitable. A new software program, that for the first time can help several cars to coordinate their movements together, could take the edge off such a situation in future. The vehicles form a network via car-to-car communication and communicate automatically.

CHESTNUT HILL (11/3/2008) – While digital video recorders and products like TiVo allow television viewers to skip past commercials, Boston College researchers have found that fast-forwarding viewers actually pay more attention and can be influenced by brand images they view only for a fraction of a second.

MADISON, WI, November 3, 2008 -- Why are the number of students studying soil science as a major declining across the United States?

Mary Collins, University of Florida, Gainesville, writes about this in an article published in the 2008 Journal of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Education.

Collins notes that the faculties who work closely with undergraduate students have seen this steady decline for several years. And there are many reasons one can give for why this is happening.

The earliest known Hebrew text written in a Proto-Canaanite script has been discovered by Hebrew University archaeologists in an ancient city in the area where David slew Goliath – the earliest Judean city found to date. The 3,000 year old finding is thought to be the most significant archaeological discovery in Israel since the Dead Sea Scrolls – predating them by 1,000 years.

The risk of depression is greater among Iraqi soldiers who took part in the Gulf War than among civilians. Surprisingly, on the other hand, neither of these groups showed any signs of post-traumatic stress ten years after that war-­with the exception of those Iraqis who have left Iraq. This is demonstrated in a study published in the new issue of the scientific journal New Iraqi Journal of Medicine.

When it is fully up and running, the four massive detectors on the new Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN particle-physics lab near Geneva are expected to produce up to 15 million gigabytes, aka 15 petabytes, of data every year. Andreas Hirstius, manager of CERN Openlab and the CERN School of Computing, explains in November's Physics World how computer scientists have risen to the challenge of dealing with this unprecedented volume of data.

Irvine, Calif. — The fight against climate warming has an unexpected ally in mushrooms growing in dry spruce forests covering Alaska, Canada, Scandinavia and other northern regions, a new UC Irvine study finds.

Virginia Key, Fla. – In a paper published in the journal Science today, scientists Gabriel A. Vecchi of NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, Kyle L. Swanson of the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee Atmospheric Sciences Group and Brian J. Soden from the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science teamed up to study hurricane data observed over more than 50 years.

Oregon researchers have synthesized an elusive metal-hydroxide compound in sufficient and rapidly produced yields, potentially paving the way for improved precursor inks that could boost semiconductor capabilities for large-area applications.

The key to a "bottom-up" production of possibly the first heterometallic gallium-indium hydroxide nanocluster was the substitution of nitroso-butylamine as an additive in place of nitrosobenzene.