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By Stephen Strauss of Nature magazine The hope that swarms of gamers can help to solve difficult biological problems has been given another boost by a report in the journal PLoS One, showing that data gleaned from the online game Phylo are helping to untangle a major problem in comparative genomics. The game was created to address the 'multiple sequence alignment (MSA) problem', which refers to the difficulty of aligning roughly similar sequences of DNA in genes common to many species.

I have a positive outlook for 2012. But it's more important than ever to map out the goals you want to stick to.

Rapid cooling of ordinary water or compression of ordinary ice: either of these can transform normal H2O into an exotic substance that resembles glass in its transparency, brittleness, hardness, and luster. Unlike everyday ice, which has a highly organized crystalline structure, this glass-like material's molecules are arranged in a random, disorganized way. Scientists have studied glassy water for decades, but the exact temperature at which water acquires glass-like properties has been the subject of heated debate for years, due to the difficulty of manipulating pure glassy water in laboratories.

Light traveling in an optical fiber loses power over distance. A number of factors are responsible for this power loss, but one that is particularly important at high data rates is the loss that occurs due to changes in light polarization. Hui Dong at the A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research and co-workers1 have developed and tested a method of determining this polarization-dependent loss (PDL) in an optical fiber cable by taking measurements from just one end of the fiber

(PhysOrg.com) -- Of the many exotic and counterintuitive aspects of particle and quantum physics, exciton and polariton quasiparticles are among the most interesting. An exciton forms when a photon is absorbed by a semiconductor as a Coulomb force-bound state of a (negatively-charged) electron and a (positively-charged) hole; this particle pair can be seen as an elementary excitation of condensed matter able to transport energy without the transfer of net electric charge, and moreover has size- and shape-dependent optoelectronic properties

Scientists from the University of Sheffield have developed pigment-free, intensely coloured polymer materials, which could provide new, anti-counterfeit devices on passports or banknotes due to their difficulty to copy.

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Work coming out of MIT's Media Lab has taken the imaging powers of a Microsoft Kinect and used them to power software that reveals how we'll be videoconferencing in the future.

The iPad is a natural device for magazine content--it may be the future of the genre, in many ways . But successes have been few and far between so far, so Apple may be trying to help digital magazines by building in a template to the code

The iPad is a natural device for magazine content--it may be the future of the genre, in many ways . But successes have been few and far between so far, so Apple may be trying to help digital magazines by building in a template to the code. Is this a good thing

PGT: Ryo Ishikawa surged to the top of the leaderboard amid concern about his Japanese homeland, then was clearly distracted and struggled badly in Friday's second round.

%excerpt% Read more here: Harnessing the Sun More Efficiently