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343 articles from WEDNESDAY 4.1.2012

• WEDNESDAY 4. JANUARY, 2012
• 01:36 Austria and Czech Republic divided over nuclear power

  Read the story at BBC Science/Nature
  Europe's nuclear naysayer surrounded by atomic powers  

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• 01:35 VIDEO: Austria's mothballed nuclear power station

  Read the story at BBC Science/Nature
  Bethany Bell visited the Zwentendorf atomic power plant near Vienna which never went online.  

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• 01:26 'Lost world' discovered around Antarctic vents

  Read the story at PhysOrg
  Communities of species previously unknown to science have been discovered on the seafloor near Antarctica, clustered in the hot, dark environment surrounding hydrothermal vents.  

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• 01:26 BlackBerry maker vows privacy safeguard amid probe

  Read the story at PhysOrg
  Research In Motion vowed Tuesday to defend the legal privacy rights of BlackBerry users after a judicial commission in Pakistan ordered copies of smartphone communications in a scandal probe.  

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• 01:26 Deadly fly parasite spotted for first time in honey bees

  Read the story at PhysOrg
  Honey bees can become the unwitting hosts of a fly parasite that causes them to abandon their hives and die after a bout of disoriented, "zombie-like" behavior, San Francisco State University researchers have found.  

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• 01:26 GABA signaling prunes back copious 'provisional' synapses during neural circuit assembly

  Read the story at PhysOrg
  Quite early in its development, the mammalian brain has all the raw materials on hand to forge complex neural networks. But forming the connections that make these intricate networks so exquisitely functional is a process that occurs one synapse at a time. An important question for neuroscience has been: how exactly do stable synapses form? How do nerve cells of particular types know which of their cortical neighbors to "synapse" with, and which to leave out of their emerging networks?  

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• 01:26 Identifying sloth species at a genetic level

  Read the story at PhysOrg
  Identifying species, separating out closely related species and managing each type on its own, is an important part of any animal management system. Some species, like the two types of two-toed sloth, are so close in appearance and behavior that differentiation can be challenging. Conservation researchers at San Diego Zoo Global's Institute of Conservation Research have developed a mechanism for identifying these reclusive species from each other.  

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• 01:26 New clues to human deafness found in mice

  Read the story at PhysOrg
  Providing clues to deafness, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have identified a gene that is required for proper development of the mouse inner ear.  

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• 01:26 Ohio quakes could incite fracking policy shift

  Read the story at PhysOrg
  (AP) -- In Ohio, geographically and politically positioned to become a leading importer of wastewater from gas drilling, environmentalists and lawmakers opposed to the technique known as fracking are seizing on a series of small earthquakes as a signal to proceed with caution.  

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• 01:26 Scientists develop drought-tolerant alfalfa

  Read the story at PhysOrg
  With much of the Southwest struggling with drought, many ranchers and dairy farmers are having difficulty finding enough hay for their livestock and making tough choices: pay up to twice as much as last year and ship it in from hundreds of miles away or do without and sell off some of their herd.  

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• 01:26 Unique E. coli protein may be not after all

  Read the story at PhysOrg
  A bacterial protein recently thought to be a unique mechanism for utilizing iron may not be after all. Researchers from the University of Georgia, the Fellowship for Interpretation of Genomes, the University of Oklahoma and the University of Utah School of Medicine report their findings in the latest issue of the online journal mBio.  

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• 01:15 Jupiter & the Moon Dazzle Skywatchers With Celestial Dance (SPACE.com)

  Read the story at Yahoo!
  SPACE.com - The moon and Jupiter kicked off a new year of skywatching Monday night (Jan. 2) in a cosmic rendezvous that amazed skywatchers around the world.  

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• 01:12 Ohio quakes could incite fracking policy shift (AP)

  Read the story at Yahoo!
  AP - In Ohio, geographically and politically positioned to become a leading importer of wastewater from gas drilling, environmentalists and lawmakers opposed to the technique known as fracking are seizing on a series of small earthquakes as a signal to proceed with caution.  

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• 00:52 'Lost world' discovered around Antarctic vents

  Read the story at ScienceDaily
  Communities of species previously unknown to science have been discovered on the seafloor near Antarctica, clustered in the hot, dark environment surrounding hydrothermal vents. The discoveries include new species of yeti crab, starfish, barnacles, sea anemones, and potentially an octopus.  

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• 00:52 New clues to human deafness found in mice

  Read the story at ScienceDaily
  Researchers have identified a gene that is required for proper development of the mouse inner ear. In humans, this gene, known as FGF20, is located in a portion of the genome that has been associated with inherited deafness in otherwise healthy families.  

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• 00:45 Blame Hitchcock's Crazed Birds on Toxic Algae (LiveScience.com)

  Read the story at Yahoo!
  LiveScience.com - Moviemaker Alfred Hitchcock appears to have drawn some inspiration for one of his classic thrillers, "The Birds," with the help of toxin-producing algae.  

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• 00:33 In praise of … graphene | Editorial

  Read the story at Guardian Unlimited Science
  

  The honorary knighthoods awarded to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov reaffirm the old adage that the simplest ideas are the best

  The Nobel prize, and now honorary knighthoods, awarded to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov reaffirm the old adage that the simplest ideas are the best. For decades schoolchildren have been taught how graphite – the everyday stuff that provides the "lead" in your pencil – is made up of stacked sheets of carbon atoms, arranged in hexagonal rings; this pair of Russians based at the University of Manchester set out to do nothing more than pull out one sheet from the pile. Gloriously, they succeeded in doing so by tearing thin layers of graphite off a block with sticky tape, which they then folded over and pulled apart again and again so that the layers got ever thinner. OK, we admit that a few additional steps were required, but how marvellous that cutting-edge physics can be carried out in Blue Peter style, with a pencil and sticky-backed plastic. Once extracted from graphite, the one-atom wide planes are known as graphene, resembling chicken wire not only in structure but also in being somewhat rumpled and at the same time essentially flat. While the entertainment world goes mad for 3D, science is abuzz with the vast potential of this purely two-dimensional matter: it is 100 times stronger than steel, conducts electricity better than copper, and might one day displace silicon from the chip. To understand the why of graphene's magic you'd need to master brain-busting relativistic quantum mechanics. But the stuff itself, and the rough means of making it, are both gratifyingly straightforward.

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• 00:15 US Forest Service OKs 15-turbine Vt. wind project (AP)

  Read the story at Yahoo!
  AP - The U.S. Forest Service has approved the construction of 15 wind turbines in southern Vermont's Green Mountain National Forest.  

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