Culture

Boulder, CO USA -- Paleontologist Sankar Chatterjee of Texas Tech University, aeronautical engineer Rick Lind of the University of Florida, and their students Andy Gedeon and Brian Roberts have reached back in time 115 million years to one of the most successful flying creatures in Earth's history, the pterodactyl, to conjure a robotic spy plane with next-generation capabilities.

ANN ARBOR, Mich.---A satellite about the size of a loaf of bread will be designed and built at the University of Michigan and deployed to study space weather, thanks to a new grant from the National Science Foundation.

Undergraduate and graduate students will be heavily involved in this Radio Aurora Explorer (RAX) project, led by the University of Michigan and SRI International, a California-based independent research and technology development organization.

Boulder, CO, USA -- The connection between geology and the history of the Civil War has fascinated Robert Whisonant since his undergraduate days, and now Whisonant has teamed up with geomorphologist Judy Ehlen, both of Radford University, to take history, military history in particular, a step deeper -- into the geology beneath the soldiers' feet.

COLUMBIA, Mo. – After improving the sensitivity of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), researchers at the University of Missouri actually watched the HIV-1 protease mature from an inactive form into an active infection. This process has never been directly visualized before. The findings appear today in the journal Nature.

In the current Presidential campaign it has been said often enough to become a cliche: both candidates will need to reach beyond their respective political bases to appeal to a larger-than-usual body of independent voters.

How to do so? Accentuate the negative -- or "negational identity," as behavioral scholars put it.

It comes blasting out of the blue on your airplane flight: sudden bumpiness and sometimes even a violent plummeting. It arrives without warning, and it can be more than frightening, since it causes tens of millions of dollars in injury claims every year.

It's called clear air turbulence (CAT), and a new forecasting method, published today in the Journal of Atmospheric Sciences and led by a researcher at the University of Georgia, could help pilots chart new courses around these patches of rough but clear air that can turn an otherwise unremarkable flight into a nightmare.

A team of Yale scientists has found that certain countries and some U.S. states stand to benefit from the use of compact fluorescent lighting more than others in the fight against global warming. Some places may even produce more mercury emissions by switching from incandescent light bulbs to compact fluorescent lighting.

The study, which appears online October 1 in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, looked at all 50 states and 130 countries to determine the impact of fluorescent lighting on total mercury emissions in those regions.

COLUMBIA, Mo. – For only the second time in presidential debate history, a female nominee will take the stage to spar with a male opponent. While Geraldine Ferraro broke new ground in 1984, it has taken 24 years for another female to be included as part of a major party ticket. On Thursday night, the nation will be watching as vice presidential candidates Sarah Palin and Joe Biden clash in the vice presidential debate.

WASHINGTON — As more nations pursue nuclear power, the United States and Russia, along with other countries and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), should redouble efforts to ensure a reliable supply of nuclear fuel so that countries seeking nuclear energy have less incentive to build their own facilities to enrich uranium and reprocess spent nuclear fuel, says a new report by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and Russian Academy of Sciences. Such facilities pose proliferation risks because they can also be used to produce the key ingredients for nuclear weapons.

WASHINGTON, DC — Immigrants who seek a better life in Western countries may not be able to escape the influence of their home country when it comes to their children's academic performance, according to findings from the October issue of the American Sociological Review.

Sociologists Mark Levels, Jaap Dronkers and Gerbert Kraaykamp find that large-scale influences such as country of origin, destination country and immigrant community play a role in educational outcomes for immigrant children in their host country.

MENDOZA, Argentina—The remains of a new 10-meter-long predatory dinosaur discovered along the banks of Argentina's Rio Colorado is helping to unravel how birds evolved their unusual breathing system.

Nearly 200 million people now live outside their country of birth. But the patterns of migration that got them there have proven difficult to project. Now scientists at Rockefeller University, with assistance from the United Nations, have developed a predictive model of worldwide population shifts that they say will provide better estimates of migration across international boundaries.

ANN ARBOR, Mich.--The remains of a 30-foot-long predatory dinosaur discovered along the banks of Argentina's Rio Colorado is helping to unravel how birds evolved their unusual breathing system.

University of Michigan paleontologist Jeffrey Wilson was part of the team that made the discovery, to be published Sept. 29 in the online journal Public Library of Science ONE and announced at a news conference in Mendoza, Argentina.

The discovery of this dinosaur builds on decades of paleontological research indicating that birds evolved from dinosaurs.

Sir Roger Penrose, prominent lecturer and author, as well as highly distinguished mathematician and theoretical physicist, will give Perimeter Institute's next public lecture on Wednesday, October 1.

There is now a great deal of evidence confirming the existence of a very hot and dense early stage of the universe. Much of this data comes from a detailed study of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) - radiation from the early universe that was most recently measured by NASA's WMAP satellite.

Economic globalization and liberalization have been blamed for numerous social ills over the last two decades, including a sharp rise in interethnic violence in countries all over the world. Not so, say the results of a study conducted by researchers from McGill University and published in the current issue of the journal International Studies Quarterly.