Thu, 04/11/2010 - 00:41 by Prince damin
San Francisco -- Bones and bottles found near San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge could offer a picture of how the city's residents lived 150 years ago, researchers say.
City work crews clearing soil contaminated by lead paint uncovered the artifacts at historic Fort Mason, a popular tourist site within view of the iconic bridge, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Wednesday.
"The bones and artifacts were just a couple of feet underground, and as soon as the archaeologist we had on site to monitor the work was notified, he stopped all of the work," National Park Service spokeswoman Alexandra Picavet said.
Federal law intended to prevent looting prohibits her from revealing the exact location, she said.
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Wed, 03/11/2010 - 02:22 by Prince damin
Baltimore -- The chore of polishing the family silver may become a thing of the past, as U.S. scientists say they may have banished tarnish to history.
Researchers at the University of Maryland and the Walters Art Museum are developing a microscopic coating they say can slow the tarnishing of silver to a nearly undetectable rate, The Baltimore Sun reported Monday.
A $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation will fund the project to refine a process known as "atomic layer deposition," with the main goal of benefiting museums, like the Walters, which hold extensive collections of ancient silver statues, jewelry and other silver artifacts.
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Wed, 27/10/2010 - 10:57 by Priyanka
As per researchers of a new study published in journal 'Science' on Tuesday, one fifth of all vertebrates, animals with a backbone, and plant species are at risk of extinction and something needs to be done to prevent this from happening.
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Tue, 26/10/2010 - 09:48 by Prince damin
New Delhi -- A rich collection of insect fossils preserved in amber in India shows a greater amount of prehistoric biodiversity than scientists say they expected.
German and U.S. researchers say the 52-million-year-old fossils of bees, ants, gnats, flies, termites and other insects discovered in amber deposits in western India reveal a wider range of insects than India's geological history would suggest, ScienceNews.org reported Monday.
At the time the amber formed, India was in a period of isolation.
The tectonic plate carrying it had separated from Madagascar about 40 million years earlier, and was just about to collide with the Asian plate that would eventually give rise to the Himalayas.
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Mon, 25/10/2010 - 22:40 by Prince damin
Miami -- Haiti's January earthquake may not have relieved stresses on the main earthquake fault there, leaving it "locked and loaded" for a major quake, researchers say.
Studies suggest a previously unmapped "blind" fault may have triggered the catastrophe but did little to ease centuries of seismic strain building up along the island's major Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault zone.
That could put the island at risk for repeat temblors along the Enriquillo fault, one researcher said.
"Even if this earthquake did not occur along the entire fault, it's certainly an indication that stress has built up in the area," Andrew Freed, a Purdue University geophysicist, told The Miami Herald.
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Sat, 23/10/2010 - 09:41 by Prince damin
University Park, Pa. -- Japanese and U.S. scientists say two space telescopes helped them detect an X-ray-emitting object previously hidden inside our Milky Way galaxy.
The object -- a binary system -- was revealed Wednesday when MAXI, an instrument on the Japanese Experiment Module "Kibo" on the International Space Station caught it in the act of erupting with a massive blast of X-rays, ScienceDaily.com reported Friday.
Astronomers around the world were quickly alerted and NASA's Swift Observatory followed up with an urgent "target-of-opportunity" observation 9 hours later, which allowed for the location of the X-ray nova to be measured accurately.
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Sat, 23/10/2010 - 07:22 by Prince damin
Providence, R.I. -- The phrase "by the light of the silvery moon" is more than just poetic, scientists say -- the moon really does contain deposits of the precious metal.
The surprise discovery was made when NASA crashed a rocket into a lunar crater and analyzed the material thrown up by the impact to see if it contained water, The Daily Telegraph reported.
Water was found, scientists say, by they also discovered a treasure trove of elements including traces of silver.
In addition to the silver, the analysis found mercury, calcium, magnesium, carbon monoxide and dioxide, ammonia and sodium in the target crater of Cabeus in a permanently shaded area of the moon with temperatures as low as minus 396 degrees F.
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Fri, 22/10/2010 - 10:07 by Priyanka
NASA scientists on Thursday announced in a press conference that they have discovered water in the form of ice on the surface of moon when they slammed two spacecraft into moon crater last year.
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Fri, 22/10/2010 - 09:53 by Prince damin
Canberra, Australia -- Huge swathes of coral in Southeast Asian and Indian Ocean reefs have died in what scientists say may be "the worst such event known to science."
Scientists from the Australian Research Center and James Cook University say coral cover in the region could drop from an average of 50 percent to about 10 percent and will take years to recover, striking at local fishing and regional tourism industries, ScienceDaily.com reported Thursday.
"It is certainly the worst coral die-off we have seen since 1998. It may prove to be the worst such event known to science," Andrew Baird of the ARC said. "So far around 80 percent of Acropora colonies and 50 percent of colonies from other species have died since the outbreak began in May this year."
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Fri, 22/10/2010 - 09:36 by Prince damin
Washington -- U.S. scientists say the moon has significant amounts of water, perhaps twice as much as the Sahara Desert, which could facilitate eventual manned bases there.
In an experiment last year, NASA crashed a spent-fuel rocket into a lunar crater at 5,600 miles an hour while orbiting satellites analyzed the debris thrown up by the impact and found water in the form of ice, plus a host of other resources, including hydrogen, ammonia, methane, mercury, sodium and silver.
NASA announced its discovery of lunar water a year ago this month, but now more detailed analysis of the data concludes there is a lot more water on the moon than anyone expected, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
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Fri, 22/10/2010 - 09:24 by Prince damin
Rome -- Italian researchers say they've identified two specific areas in the brain that allow people to remember particularly vivid dreams.
Italian scientists employing the latest neuroimaging techniques have managed to get down to the "deep microstructures" in two key brain areas, ANSA reported Wednesday.
"We've found the parts of the amigdala and hippocampus that are linked to bizarre and intense dreams, the ones people remember," Luigi De Gennaro of Rome University said.
"We think we've cracked why some people never remember their dreams and others have such a detailed memory you might almost call it film-like," De Gennaro said.
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Wed, 20/10/2010 - 06:31 by Prince damin
Boulder, Colo. -- The United States and other heavily populated countries could experience severe and prolonged drought in coming decades, a scientific study says.
A scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo,. says most of the Western Hemisphere, along with large parts of Eurasia, Africa and Australia, may be at threat of extreme drought this century, ScienceDaily.com reported Tuesday.
An analysis using computer climate models suggests warming temperatures associated with climate change will likely create increasingly dry conditions across much of the globe in the next 30 years, NCAR scientist Aiguo Dai says.
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