10 Mar 2010 at 3:01pm
By Zeeya Merali
It's another victory for Einstein -- albeit not a resounding one. [More]
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10 Mar 2010 at 3:00pm
By Janet Fang
A study of sexually scrambled chickens suggests that sex in birds is determined in a radically different way from that in mammals.
Researchers studied three chickens that appeared to be literally half-male and half-female, and found that nearly every cell in their bodies--from wattle to toe--has an inherent sex identity. [More]
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10 Mar 2010 at 12:30pm
Tuberculosis is a serious public health challenge in the developing world, where the infection claims roughly two million lives each year, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) . Yet the disease, which is a leading killer of patients with HIV/AIDS, is cumbersome to detect, resulting in delayed or inappropriate treatment, greater spread of the infection and preventable deaths. [More]
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10 Mar 2010 at 11:57am
About a third of all Americans still lack broadband access to the Internet. At its Digital Inclusion Summit, held Tuesday in Washington, D.C., the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) provided a preview of its upcoming National Broadband Plan (NBP) to provide high-speed Internet access to the estimated 93 million people in the U.S. without it. The plan, mandated by Congress last year as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act , aims to increase home broadband use to 90 percent of the population by 2020. [More]
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10 Mar 2010 at 10:00am
Dear EarthTalk: Short of massive efforts to build a public transportation infrastructure, which doesn’t appear likely anytime soon, what is being done to address traffic congestion, which is reaching absurd levels almost everywhere? --John Daniels, Baltimore
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10 Mar 2010 at 9:45am
Energy-efficiency gurus want to create the "Rosenfeld" as a simple unit of energy savings.
It may not roll off the tongue like the ohm, watt or volt, but it would follow in their tradition. Many call Arthur Rosenfeld, a recently retired member of the California Energy Commission , the "godfather of energy efficiency." One Rosenfeld would represent saving 3 billion kilowatt-hours per year--the same amount generated by a 500-megawatt coal-run power plant .
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10 Mar 2010 at 9:35am
Here's how to make a solar cell from silicon : take one solid block of doped silicon, saw it into thin wafers, layer said semiconductors beneath a panel of transparent glass, connect them to a metal electrode that can channel away the electrons knocked loose by incoming photons and turn it into a photovoltaic device. That process has at least two flaws: such silicon is very expensive, as much as $300,000 for a wafer, and sawing it turns as much as half of that very expensive silicon into wasted grit. [More]
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10 Mar 2010 at 8:45am
1366 Technologies can grow a photovoltaic wafer directly from melted silicon
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10 Mar 2010 at 7:00am
The forward momentum of medical progress is manifest, it could be argued, in the $50 billion spent in 2008 on pharmaceutical research and development in the quest to bring new drugs to market. But little scientific or governmental infrastructure exists to ensure that each new treatment is actually an improvement over existing therapies--and to tease out what therapies are best for which patients. [More]
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10 Mar 2010 at 6:50am
You know how uncomfortable it feels when you really have to go to the bathroom? And you have to hold it in? If researchers get their way, disease-carrying mosquitoes will spend their last moments being that uncomfortable. Cornell University scientists [Peter M. Piermarini, et al] have been trying to disrupt the life cycle of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which spread dengue fever. The mosquitoes pick up the virus when they feed on one human and transmit it in their saliva to their next victim.
There’s no vaccine for dengue, and no fully protective treatment. So the only recourse has been to figure out how to best kill the mosquitoes themselves. Here’s where urination comes in. When the mosquito takes a blood meal, it has to get rid of fluid and salt so it doesn’t overload--and die. Scientists have discovered a key protein in the renal tubes of these mosquitoes that helps with the necessary excretion. Blocking the protein keeps a mosquito from urinating. [See
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