It has been 70 years since Rothschild giraffes ( Giraffa camelopardalis rothschildi ), aka Baringo giraffes, disappeared from the Lake Baringo area of Kenya that gave them one of their names. But now eight of these critically endangered animals have returned to the lake, and with them comes an unexpected bonus: a promise of peace. [More]
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Feed SubscriptionJapan battles nuclear crisis, power effort crucial
By Kiyoshi Takenaka and Yoko Nishikawa TOKYO, March 19 (Reuters) - Exhausted engineers scrambled to fix a power cable to two reactors at Japan's tsunami-crippled nuclear station on Saturday in a race to prevent deadly radiation from an accident now rated at least as bad as America's Three Mile Island in 1979. [More]
Read More »Enhancing the magnetism
(PhysOrg.com) -- Berkeley researchers find enhanced and controllable magnetization in unique bismuth ferrite films.
Read More »U.S. Nuclear Plants to Get New Safety Reviews in Wake of Fukushima Daiichi Crisis
President Obama responded to Japan's nuclear reactor crisis yesterday by asking the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to make a comprehensive safety review of U.S.
Read More »Fewer Nurses Means Higher Patient Death Risk
Wanna get out of the hospital alive? Well, the nursing staff has a lot to do with it. Now a study finds that a patient’s risk of dying goes up along with the number of work shifts that a hospital is understaffed in nurses
Read More »Music is All in the Mind
By Philip Ball A pianist plays a series of notes, and the woman echoes them on a computerized music system. [More]
Read More »25 Years After: Scenes from Chernobyl–The Worst Nuclear Accident in History [Slide Show]
CHERNOBYL, Ukraine--The disaster at Chernobyl on April 26, 1986, is currently ranked as the worst nuclear accident in history.
Read More »How Far from Fukushima Will Fallout Pose a Health Risk?
As the condition of the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station in Japan continues to deteriorate, nuclear safety experts, government regulators and health physicists are keeping close watch on the situation to determine the danger--both real and hypothetical--that the incident poses to people near the plant. [More]
Read More »Few radioactive particles on U.S. west coast
By Fredrik Dahl VIENNA (Reuters) - Minuscule amounts of radioactive particles believed to have come from Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant have been detected on the U.S. west coast, two diplomatic sources said Friday. [More]
Read More »European life expectancy rising despite obesity
Life expectancy in Europe is continuing to increase despite an obesity epidemic, with people in Britain reaching an older age than those living in the United States, according to study of trends over the last 40 years.
Read More »Happy 100th, Roosevelt Dam!
This month marks the 100th anniversary of the completion of the Roosevelt Dam in Arizona. It was a major part of the Salt River project, which aimed to create hydroelectric power from the Salt River and make its surrounding lands cultivable. The dam was an engineering marvel and was built as part of the Reclamation Act passed in 1902, which sought to irrigate arid lands in the United States--about one-third of the country’s land at the time
Read More »Simulating tomorrow’s accelerators at near the speed of light
(PhysOrg.com) -- As conventional accelerators like CERN's Large Hadron Collider grow ever more vast and expensive, the best hope for the high-energy machines of the future may lie in "tabletop" accelerators like BELLA (the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator), now being built by the LOASIS program at the U.S. Department of Energys Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
Read More »Learning from Tinka: Able-bodied chimps cop a back-scratching technique from a handicapped friend.
With one misstep and the snap of a trap, Tinka was broken. The 50-year-old chimpanzee’s hands were mangled and left severely deformed and almost useless
Read More »From One Physicist to Another: Lawrence Krauss Reflects on the Life and Work of Richard Feynman
Editor's note: Below is an excerpt from QUANTUM MAN: Richard Feynman's Life in Science (W. W
Read More »Physicists investigate lower dimensions of the universe
(PhysOrg.com) -- Several speculative theories in physics involve extra dimensions beyond our well-known four (which are broken down into three dimensions of space and one of time). Some theories have suggested 5, 10, 26, or more, with the extra spatial dimensions "hiding" within our observable three dimensions. One thing that all of these extra dimensions have in common is that none has ever been experimentally detected; they are all mathematical predictions.
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