Move over, Archimedes. A researcher at Harvard University is finding that ancient Greek craftsmen were able to engineer sophisticated machines without necessarily understanding the mathematical theory behind their construction.
Science news // 30 September, 2007 07:10:23
A research team led by San Jose State University and the University of California, Santa Barbara has discovered forests of a species of kelp previously thought endangered or extinct in deep waters near the Galapagos Islands.
Science news // 27 September, 2007 07:09:59
NASA-funded astrobiologists have found evidence of oxygen present in Earth's atmosphere earlier than previously known, pushing back the timeline for the rise of oxygen in the atmosphere.
Science news // 17 September, 2007 08:09:41
For two generations of physicists, it has been a standard belief that the neutron, an electrically neutral elementary particle and a primary component of an atom, actually carries a positive charge at its center and an offsetting negative charge at its outer edge.
Science news // 11 September, 2007 08:09:21
An 80-million-year-old dinosaur fossil unearthed in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia demonstrates that miniaturization, long thought to be a hallmark of bird origins and a necessary precursor of flight, occurred progressively in primitive dinosaurs.
Science news // 04 September, 2007 08:09:38
Starved. Stomped. Radiated. Poisoned. It's all in a day's work for the common household cockroach. The abuse these creatures can withstand is amazing.
Science news // 03 September, 2007 08:09:42
A team of researchers has discovered that a bacterial parasite (called Wolbachia) can insert almost its entire genome into the genomes of members of one host species (a fly called Drosophila ananassae), and can insert parts of its genome into the genomes of members of several other host species.
Science news // 13 August, 2007 08:08:48
About 40 percent of deaths worldwide are caused by water, air and soil pollution, concludes a Cornell researcher. Such environmental degradation, coupled with the growth in world population, are major causes behind the rapid increase in human diseases, which the World Health Organization has recently reported. Both factors contribute to the malnourishment and disease susceptibility of 3.7 billion people, he says.
Science news // 08 August, 2007 08:08:04
Two new fossils, described this week in the journal Nature, cast fresh light on a little understood and important period of human prehistory at the dawn of our own genus, Homo.
Science news // 07 August, 2007 08:08:58
Cryptography is just about as old as written communication itself, and mathematics has long supplied methods for the cryptographic toolbox. Starting in the 1970s, increasingly sophisticated mathematics began to make inroads into cryptography, changing the nature of the field and bringing new perspectives on what it means to keep communications secure.