Topics : Science World Report

Mar 02, 2012 02:00 PM EST

New Computers Respond to Students' Emotions, Boredom

Emotion-sensing computer software that models and responds to students' cognitive and emotional states â€“ including frustration and boredom â€“ has been developed by University of Notre Dame Assistant Professor of Psychology Sidney D'Mello and colleagues from the University of Memphis and...

Mar 02, 2012 01:31 PM EST

World's Best Measurement of W Boson Mass Points to Higgs Mass and Tests Standard Model

The world's most precise measurement of the mass of the W boson, one of nature's elementary particles, has been achieved by scientists from the CDF and DZero collaborations at the Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

Mar 02, 2012 10:54 AM EST

Protecting Living Fossil Trees

Scientists are working to protect living fossil trees in Fiji from the impact of climate change with cutting-edge DNA sequencing technology. Dr Peter Prentis, from QUT's Science and Engineering Faculty, said the findings would enable researchers to understand how biological diversity is generated...

Mar 02, 2012 10:01 AM EST

Solved: The Mystery of the Nanoscale Crop Circles

Almost three years ago a team of scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) was performing an experiment in which layers of gold mere nanometers (billionths of a meter) thick were being heated on a flat silicon surface and then allowed to cool....

Mar 02, 2012 07:45 AM EST

Ocean Acidification Rate May be Unprecedented, Study Says

The world's oceans may be turning acidic faster today from human carbon emissions than they did during four major extinctions in the last 300 million years, when natural pulses of carbon sent global temperatures soaring, says a new study in Science. The study is the first of its kind to survey the g...

Mar 01, 2012 03:23 PM EST

Research Reveals First Evidence of Hunting by Prehistoric Ohioans

Cut marks found on Ice Age bones indicate that humans in Ohio hunted or scavenged animal meat earlier than previously known. Dr. Brian Redmond, curator of archaeology at The Cleveland Museum of Natural History, was lead author on research published in the Feb. 22, 2012 online issue of the journal Wo...

Mar 01, 2012 03:09 PM EST

LAMIS -- A Green Chemistry Alternative for Laser Spectroscopy

At some point this year, after NASA's rover Curiosity has landed on Mars, a laser will fire a beam of infrared light at a rock or soil sample. This will "ablate" or vaporize a microgram-sized piece of the target, generating a plume of ionized gas or plasma, which will be analyzed by spectrometers to...

Mar 01, 2012 11:48 AM EST

Graphene-based Optical Modulators Poised to Break Speed Limits in Digital Communications

In yet another astounding application of the "wonder material" graphene, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley discovered that it makes an excellent active media for optical modulators. Graphene-based modulators are expected to significantly enhance ultrafast optical communication and...

Mar 01, 2012 11:36 AM EST

On the Path to 1 Terabit-per-second Networks

As IP traffic continues to increase and the router interface rate extends beyond 100 gigabits-per-second (Gb/s), future optical networksâ€”ones that would achieve unprecedented speeds of 1 terabit-per-second (Tb/s)â€”will be required to support the rapid growth of data services with differ...

Mar 01, 2012 09:51 AM EST

Road Map Provides Insight to Urbanization Phenomenon

As the world's population moves towards urbanisation, an international research team involving Queen Mary, University of London, has begun to unlock the factors driving the growing phenomenon. The study, published in the Nature journal Scientific Reports, examined almost 200 years of data on the evo...

Mar 01, 2012 09:34 AM EST

New Laser can Point the Way to New Energy Harvesting

New ultrafast laser equipment, capable of generating intense pulses of light as short as a few femtoseconds from the UV to the Infra Red, will help scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) measure how energy is transferred from molecule to molecule and point the way to molecular structures ...

Feb 29, 2012 02:27 PM EST

3 Scientific Expeditions Seek treasure Under the Ice in the Frozen Continent

In a modern iteration of the great age of Antarctic exploration of the 19th and 20th centuries, three teams of scientists are rushing to reach not the South Pole like Roald Amundsen, Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton, but lakes deep below the surface of the Frozen Continent believed to hold ...