Archive for February, 2012
Patterns of social mobility, the spread of an infection and phone calls made by the inhabitants of a city can be predicted with a new mathematical model, published in Nature, which improves the standard calculation used so far. The only parameter needed is the distribution of the population.
Knowing where there will be jams before the inhabitants of a geographical area go on vacation is possible thanks to this new mathematical model that predicts flows and transport with only the aforementioned parameter, the population distribution. The new formula improves the results of Zipf model, because it corrects data requirements of the standard method.
The radial model, presented in Nature, improves the accuracy of predictive tools based on flows of social movements, such as migration, transport, epidemiology and even phone calls.One of the most interesting applications is the study of populations without historical data. Unlike the previous method, the lack of information prevents to accurately predict the mobility of a given area. Read the rest of this entry »
It has been discovered in northwest Tasmania, Australia, after some mapping work, the existence of a mysterious border geographical line between the occupied territories separately by two species of millipedes.
This line is so sharp and detached from physical traits as if it were a human frontier between nations. Both species are common in their respective “countries”, but rarely cross into the territory of the other.
The perimeter of the boundary runs along some 230 kilometers, and the thickness of the boundary line, or the width of the “common area”, where individuals of both species converge, has less than 100 meters. The mapping was carried out over a period of two years by Bob Mesibov, specialist in millipedes and researcher at the Queen Victoria Museum in Launceston, Tasmania. Read the rest of this entry »
In some regions, the rate at which changes the acidity of the ocean as a result of human activity since the early Industrial Revolution becomes up to several hundred times the natural acidification rate recorded since the Last Glacial Maximum to shortly before the Industrial Revolution.
Nearly a third of all anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) arrives at the world’s oceans. Reacting with seawater, CO2 increases the acidity of water, which can significantly reduce the process of calcification of marine organisms such as corals and molluscs.
However, the extent to which human activities have increased the acidity of the surface has been very difficult to quantify at regional level, as it varies naturally from season to season and even year to year. It is also different from natural causes, among the various regions. Another factor that makes it even more is that directs observations dating back to just 30 years ago. Read the rest of this entry »
It was obvious that people enjoy doing gossip, but now scientific research has confirmed the positive effects do, especially when it comes to criticize someone for bad behavior and reveal to others the bad thing that has done.
The results of this study by the group of psychologists Robb Willer, Matthew Feinberg, Dacher Keltner and Jennifer Stellar, University of California at Berkeley, suggests that this activity can promote benefits as diverse as reducing stress levels, and mitigate the misconduct.
The study has also led to the conclusion that gossip can be therapeutic. In the experiments, heart rate increased when the volunteers saw someone behaving badly, but this increase was attenuated when they could pass on to others information about what they saw, to alert them. Disseminate information about the person who had been misbehaving tended to make people feel better. Read the rest of this entry »
Scientists from the Universities of Granada and Barcelona have first described at the molecular level how the water diffuses through the liquid state nanochannels, tiny tubes with an inner diameter of 1 to 100 nanometers. The study, published in the Physical Review journal may help improve the processes of desalination and water filtration.
The abnormally rapid diffusion of water confined in nanotubes is due to the competition between the formation of hydrogen bonds links and the availability of free volume for the molecules to reorganize. This explains for the first time scientists from the Universities of Granada and Barcelona one of the anomalies of water.
This molecule in the liquid state has a strange set of properties that other chemicals do not share: up to a total of 65 anomalies. Some of them have been known for over 300 years as the fact that expands when cooled down to below 4 degrees Celsius. Read the rest of this entry »
It has managed to recreate an important process that could occur in the prebiotic world. This scientific breakthrough is the first step toward a possible definitive demonstration of how developed two simple sugars threose and erythrose, key pieces of machinery that led to prebiotic emergence of the first living beings.
All biological molecules have the capacity to exist as L-forms (“left handed”) or dextrorotatory (“right-handed”). All sugars in biology consist of dextrorotatory molecules, and all amino acids that comprise the peptides and proteins are levorotatory. Read the rest of this entry »
It has managed to build the smallest magnetic data storage unit in the world. Use only 12 atoms per bit, the basic unit of digital information, and stores a full byte (8 bits) into a tiny amount of matter: only 96 atoms. In comparison, a modern hard drive needs more than 500 million atoms per byte.
The technological feat is the work of a team of scientists from IBM and the Center for Free-Electron Laser Science (CFEL) in German. This unique unit of data storage was built atom by Atom with the help of a scanning tunneling microscope in the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California.
The team of Sebastian Loth of CFEL and Andreas Heinrich of IBM built the regular patterns of iron atoms, aligning them in rows of six atoms each. Two rows are sufficient to store one bit. Read the rest of this entry »
An international work shows how and when a microorganism was able to generate oxygen absorbing sunlight and make photosynthesis. The body responsible, 1,600 million years ago, could have marked the origin of the algae and plants.
2,400 million years ago came the first cyanobacteria capable of yielding oxygen in photosynthesis. From that moment all the agencies had to learn to live with what at that time was a poisonous gas that supports life today.
Now an international team of experts reveals how 1,600 million years ago, a eukaryotic microorganism was first able to produce oxygen exploiting sunlight. According to the research, published in the latest issue of the journal Science, could be the original ancestor descended all plants and algae. Read the rest of this entry »
Shortly after the discovery of a possible unicellular ancestor of all animals known in rocks 570 million years old located in southern China, we now speak of another discovery that immediately and just as spectacular: the discovery of what appear to be the remains of the first animal that existed on the planet, or at least the oldest known.
This important discovery, made by an international team of experts during a geological survey in the desert of Namibia, Africa, could roll back many tens of millions of years the date of appearance of animal life on Earth.
The discovery appears to be the oldest animal fossils found to date was conducted by the Bob Brain, Ditsong Museum in South Africa, along with Tony Prave from the University of St Andrews in the UK, and Karl-Heinz Hoffmann of the Geological Survey of Namibia. The finding did in ancient rocks of the Etosha National Park. Read the rest of this entry »
Rice is a staple for nearly half the world population. And will feed even more people as the latter grows.
To avoid the devastating insect pests that cause serious crop losses, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), an organization composed of experts from many countries and based in the Philippines, has called world in an international conference on this subject, recently held in Hanoi, Vietnam, to promote the biodiversity of the natural predators of insects that are harmful to the rice fields, and a ban on certain insecticides that kill indiscriminately, even those natural predators.
This appeal is part of the new plan of action that the institute has designed to reduce the damage of herbivorous insects in the Superfamily Fulgoroidea cause rice yields in Asia, where much of the cultivated rice in the world. Read the rest of this entry »