Today's Reuters Science News Headlines - Yahoo! News:
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German scientists concoct new coolant for electric cars
Fri,13 Jul 2012 04:12 PM PDT
Reuters - LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists in Germany have come up with a new fluid for cooling the expensive batteries in electric cars and thereby extending their life, another potential step in improving the cost efficiency of electric propulsion. The fluid, dubbed CryoSolplus, absorbs heat more effectively than either air or water and could allow for tighter packing of batteries under the hood, according to a team of researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Environmental, Safety and Energy Technology in Oberhausen. ... Full Story | Top |
U.S. should scale down $1 billion Kansas biodefense lab: study
Fri,13 Jul 2012 02:54 PM PDT
Reuters -  KANSAS CITY, Kansas (Reuters) - The United States should consider scaling down ambitious plans for a $1 billion laboratory in Kansas to study potentially deadly animal diseases, the National Research Council said on Friday in a key report to help the government decide how to proceed. Construction of the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility in Manhattan, Kansas, has been stalled by concerns that deadly animal diseases could escape and devastate agriculture. Some have called the facility a costly boondoggle. ...
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Gene-swapping vaccines spawn lethal poultry virus: experts
Thu,12 Jul 2012 11:59 AM PDT
Reuters - HONG KONG (Reuters) - Three vaccines used to prevent respiratory disease in chickens have swapped genes, producing two lethal new strains that have killed tens of thousands of fowl across two states in Australia, scientists reported on Friday. The creation of the deadly new variant was only possible because the vaccines contained live viruses, even though they were weakened forms, said Joanne Devlin, lead author of the paper published in the journal Science. Devlin and her team discovered how closely related the two new strains were with viruses in the vaccines after analyzing their genes. ... Full Story | Top |
No crustacean, no cry? Bob Marley gets his own species
Tue,10 Jul 2012 02:14 PM PDT
Reuters -  WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Reggae immortal Bob Marley has joined Barack Obama and Elvis Presley in the elite club of those who have biological species named in their honor. In Marley's case, it's a small parasitic crustacean blood feeder that infests fish in Caribbean coral reefs, now known as Gnathia marleyi. "I named this species, which is truly a natural wonder, after Marley because of my respect and admiration for Marley's music," Paul Sikkel, a marine biologist at Arkansas State University, said in a statement on Tuesday. "Plus, this species is as uniquely Caribbean as Marley. ...
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Giant ice telescope hunts for dark matter's space secrets
Tue,10 Jul 2012 12:02 AM PDT
Reuters -  MELBOURNE (Reuters) - Scientists are using the world's biggest telescope, buried deep under the South Pole, to try to unravel the mysteries of tiny particles known as neutrinos, hoping to shed light on how the universe was made. The mega-detector, called IceCube, took 10 years to build 2,400 meters below the Antarctic ice. At one cubic km, it is bigger than the Empire State building, the Chicago Sears Tower - now known as Willis Tower - and Shanghai's World Financial Center combined. ...
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Hawking's rival says Higgs wager win is icing on cake
Fri,6 Jul 2012 10:24 AM PDT
Reuters -  LONDON (Reuters) - The U.S. scientist who won a $100 wager with Stephen Hawking over whether the Higgs boson would ever be found said on Friday winning was the icing on the cake of a major scientific discovery. Scientists at Europe's CERN research centre announced on Wednesday that they had found a new subatomic particle which appeared to be the boson imagined and named half a century ago by theoretical physicist Peter Higgs. Hawking, Britain's most famous living scientist, said the discovery should earn Higgs the Nobel Prize, but admitted in an interview that it would make him $100 poorer. ...
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Asian nations want to sink South Korea whale hunt plan
Thu,5 Jul 2012 01:08 PM PDT
Reuters -  PANAMA CITY (Reuters) - South Korea's proposal to resume whaling for scientific research has angered other Asian countries and conservationists who said the practice would skirt a global ban on whale hunting. Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard said she would fight the proposal, which was made on Wednesday at a meeting of the International Whaling Commission in Panama City, while the United States said it planned to take the matter up with the South Korean government. ...
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Japanese inventor hopes "ro-butt" can develop communication
Wed,4 Jul 2012 09:18 PM PDT
Reuters - TOKYO (Reuters) - The mechanical buttocks may look like a new low for the world of Japanese robotics, but they may actually mark a new leap into the future of humanoid development. Inventor Nobuhiro Takahashi programmed his creation, called "SHIRI" or "butt" in Japanese, to respond with different emotions to different human touches. Takahashi hopes to use the proto-type technology to develop responses which can be applied to other part of a robot's body, in particular the face, to help with non-verbal communication. ... Full Story | Top |
From a vial of mom's blood, a fetus's entire genome
Wed,4 Jul 2012 10:10 AM PDT
Reuters - NEW YORK (Reuters) - The days of pregnant women having a 3-inch-long (8-centimetre-long) hollow needle jabbed into their abdomens may be numbered. For the second time in a month, scientists have announced that a simple blood test, rather than more invasive tests such as amniocentesis, can determine a fetus's genetic make-up, identifying mutations causing any of about 3,000 inherited disorders that arise from a glitch in a single gene, such as cystic fibrosis. ... Full Story | Top |
Poof! Dust disk that might have made planets disappears
Wed,4 Jul 2012 10:02 AM PDT
Reuters -  WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In a cosmic case of "now-you-see-it, now-you-don't," a brilliant disk of dust around a Sun-like star has suddenly vanished, and the scientists who observed the disappearance aren't sure about what happened. Typically, the kind of dusty haloes that circle stars have the makings of rocky planets like Earth, according to Ben Zuckerman, one of a team of researchers who reported the finding on Wednesday in the journal Nature. Composed of warm dusty material, these disks can be seen by telescopes looking for infrared light. ...
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Scientists to unveil milestone in Higgs boson hunt
Tue,3 Jul 2012 03:11 PM PDT
Reuters -  LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists hunting the elusive subatomic 'Higgs' particle will unveil findings on Wednesday that take them nearer to understanding how the Big Bang at the dawn of time gave rise to stars, planets and even life. Physicists who have been smashing particles together near light-speed at the CERN laboratory near Geneva have already seen tantalizing glimpses of the "Higgs boson", the missing piece of the fundamental theory of physics known as the Standard Model. The world of science now awaits a mass of evidence big enough to be deemed a formal discovery. ...
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Archaeologists dig up bog army bones in Denmark
Tue,3 Jul 2012 12:52 PM PDT
Reuters - COPENHAGEN (Reuters) - Danish archaeologists said on Tuesday they had re-opened a mass grave of scores of slaughtered Iron Age warriors to find new clues about their fate and the bloody practices of Germanic tribes on the edge of the Roman Empire. Bones of around 200 soldiers have already been found preserved in a peat bog near the village of Alken on Denmark's Jutland peninsula. Experts started digging again on Monday, saying they expected to find more bodies dating back 2,000 years to around the time of Christ. ... Full Story | Top |
What a drag, Israeli firm grows "highless" marijuana
Tue,3 Jul 2012 03:31 AM PDT
Reuters -  SAFED, Israel (Reuters) - They grow in a secret location in northern Israel. A tall fence, security cameras and an armed guard protect them from criminals. A hint of their sweet-scented blossom carries in the air: rows and rows of cannabis plants, as far as the eye can see. It is here, at a medical marijuana plantation atop the hills of the Galilee, where researchers say they have developed marijuana that can be used to ease the symptoms of some ailments without getting patients high. "Sometimes the high is not always what they need. Sometimes it is an unwanted side effect. ...
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Former astronaut Poindexter dies in watercraft accident
Mon,2 Jul 2012 09:53 PM PDT
Reuters -  CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - Alan Poindexter, a two-time space shuttle astronaut, has died after a personal watercraft accident in Pensacola, Florida, NASA said on Monday. Poindexter, 50, was riding WaveRunners with his two sons in Little Sabine Bay at Pensacola Beach on Sunday when the accident occurred, a spokesman for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission said. Poindexter and his 22-year-old son Samuel were riding on one WaveRunner and his older son, 26-year-old Zachary, was on another, spokesman Stan Kirkland said. ...
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Best evidence yet found for "God particle:" U.S. physicists
Mon,2 Jul 2012 01:05 PM PDT
Reuters -  BATAVIA, Illinois (Reuters) - Physicists at a U.S. laboratory said on Monday they have come tantalizingly close to proving the existence of the elusive subatomic Higgs boson - often called the "God particle" because it may bring mass and order to the universe. The announcement by the Fermi National Accelerator Lab outside Chicago came two days before physicists at CERN, the European particle accelerator near Geneva, are set to unveil their own findings in the Higgs hunt. CERN houses the world's most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). ...
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