Why did anyone think this is a potentially good idea? Here’s what Science writer David Malakoff dug up: Faced with soaring NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] satellite costs and a bleak budget outlook, lawmakers last month ordered the agency to explore ways of charging other federal agencies—and perhaps even some large consortiums of academic [...]
Categories: Science
Tagged: administrative, charging, Congress, costs, data, David Malakoff, Joint Polar Satellite System, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, taxpayers
- Published:
- 30 December 2011 – 09:47
- Author:
- By BrainiYak
A maybe not so rigorous survey of Canadian EMS workers A Canadian, in-conference, survey of 1,381 Ontario and Nova Scotia emergency service workers (apparently emergency medical technicians and paramedics, 70 percent of whom were male and had 10-years experience) discovered that: 67 percent had been verbally abused, 41 percent had been subjected to intimidation, 26 [...]
Categories: Culture,Medicine
Tagged: Blair L. Bigham, bystanders, Canadian, Catherine B. Custalow, Christian Martin-Gill, emergency services, EMS, EMS Provider and Patient Safety during Response and Transport Proceedings of an Ambulance Safety Conference, Eric Hawkins, Jane H. Brice, Jonathan R. Studne, Laurie J. Morrison, Nova Scotia, Ontario, paramedics, physical abuse, sexual assault, verbal abuse
- Published:
- 29 December 2011 – 13:01
- Author:
- By BrainiYak
The hypothesis is that heavy rain causes landslides, which unload inclined tropical faults enough for them to move Shimon Wdowinski’s 08 December presentation at the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting was novel. He said that he and a colleague had found an up to four-year temporal correlation between wet tropical cyclones and large earthquakes in [...]
Categories: Environment,Science
Tagged: American Geophysical Union 2011, cyclone, earthquake, erosion, fault, Flossie, Haiti, Herb, inclined, Morakot, Shimon Wdowinski, Taiwan, tropical, unload
- Published:
- 27 December 2011 – 14:25
- Author:
- By BrainiYak
With increased growth of previously elk-browsed woody plants and their understory — numbers of bison, beaver, and smaller animals are increasing The reintroduction of gray wolves (Canis lupus) into Yellowstone National Park appears to have increased the numbers of aspen, willow, and cottonwood by reducing the numbers of elk that previously browsed them: Synthesis results generally [...]
Categories: Environment,Science
Tagged: awarbling vireo, axidea taxus, badgers, bald eagles, beaver, bison, Bison bison, black-billed magpies, Canis latrans, Canis lupus, Caster canadensis, common yellowthroat, Corvus corax, Dendroica petechia, Empidonax traillii, Geothlypis trichas, gray wolves, Haliaeetus leucocephalus, Lincoln’s sparrow, Melospiza lincolnii, Melospiza melodia, Pica hudsonia, raven, red foxes, Robert L. Beschta, song sparrow, Vireo gilvus, Vulpes vulpes, William J. Ripple, willow flycatcher, yellow warbler, Yellowstone National Park
- Published:
- 23 December 2011 – 11:27
- Author:
- By BrainiYak
Abscisic acid and its receptors Drought-stressed plants produce abscisic acid to activate pathways that increase their ability to survive dry conditions. For example, the hormone triggers the slowing of plant growth and the closing stomatal air pores by shrinking the pair of guard cells that line each opening. Sean Cutler, at the University of California [...]
Categories: Climate,Science
Tagged: abscisic acid, Assaf Mosquna, Brian F. Volkman, crop yields, drought, Francis C. Peterson, genetic engineering, guard cells, hormone, Jorge Lozano-Juste, Sang-Youl Park, Sean R. Cutler, stomata, stress hormone, stress response
- Published:
- 21 December 2011 – 13:55
- Author:
- By BrainiYak
Demonstrating why legitimately skeptical people are un-persuaded by so many allegedly scientific findings Neal S. Young, John P. A. Ioannidis, and Omar Al-Ubaydli, Why Current Publication Practices May Distort Science, PLoS Medicine 5(10): e201. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0050201 (07 October 2008) Judith G. M. Rosmalen and Albertine J. Oldehinkel, The Role of Group Dynamics in Scientific Inconsistencies: A [...]
Categories: Science
Tagged: Albertine J. Oldehinkel, distort, group dynamics, John P. A. Ioannidis, Judith G. M. Rosmalen, Neal S. Young, Omar Al-Ubaydli, publishing
- Published:
- 16 December 2011 – 15:12
- Author:
- By BrainiYak
Interesting, for those of us who wondered how erratic interior lighting affects plants Katrine Heinsvig Kjaer and Carl-Otto Ottosen were curious about plant growth under greenhouse conditions in which northern hemisphere growers turned grow lights on during off-peak electricity times and off during more costly peak periods: Leaf expansion and stem elongation occurred at a [...]
Categories: Environment,Science
Tagged: American Society for Horticultural Science, carbon dioxide, Carl-Otto Ottosen, Chrysanthemum morifolium, Chrysanthemums, circadian, CO2, Coral Charm, greenhouse, Katrine Heinsvig Kjaer, lighting, off-peak, peak rate, photosynthetic, rhythms
- Published:
- 14 December 2011 – 14:48
- Author:
- By BrainiYak
Not so simple math Dr. Shin-Chan Han (Goddard Space Flight Center) told the annual American Geophysical Union get-together that changes in the relative velocities of the two Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellites indicated that the Tōhoku earthquake had been a magnitude 9.1 and originated deeper than estimated. This is the earthquake (and tsunami) that [...]
Categories: Environment,Science
Tagged: Anil Ananthaswamy, Chile earthquake, Fukushima Daiichi, Goddard Space Flight Center, grace, Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, megaquake, radiation release, Shin-Chan Han, Sumatra-Andaman earthquake, Tōhoku earthquake
- Published:
- 12 December 2011 – 12:34
- Author:
- By BrainiYak
What we would have predicted, given recent discoveries in epigenetic effects The nematode (round worm), Caenorhabditis elegans — that I wrote about two days ago, regarding extra-chromosomal inheritance of acquired characteristics — is also involved in a new discovery about disease variations between people with essentially identical sequences of DNA codons. In Spain, a research [...]
Categories: Medicine,Science
Tagged: Alejandro Burga, Ben Lehner, buffer, C. elegans, Caenorhabditis elegans, Centre for Genomic Regulation, chaperones, codons, disease, DNA, epigenetic, gene, heat shock protein, Hsp90, Human Genome Project, M. Olivia Casanueva, monzygotic, mutation, stochastic, twins
- Published:
- 8 December 2011 – 15:27
- Author:
- By BrainiYak
Not so “so what” numbers The University of California – Berkeley reports that NGC 3842, an elliptical galaxy 320 million light years distant, contains a black hole with a mass of 9.7 billion of our suns. NGC 4889, 336 million light years away, holds (or more properly, is held by) a possibly larger black hole. [...]
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: black hole, Chung-Pei Ma, event horizon, gravitational effects, largest black holes, Mercury, Milky Way, NGC 3842, NGC 4889, Nicholas McConnell, Pluto, solar mass
- Published:
- 7 December 2011 – 11:37
- Author:
- By BrainiYak