Culture
French and Chinese blue glass, Dutch layered glass, Baltic amber: roughly 70,000 beads manufactured all over the world have been excavated at one of the Spanish empire's remotest outposts, the Santa Catalina de Guale Mission. The beads were found as part of an extensive, ongoing research project led by a team of scientists from the American Museum of Natural History on St. Catherines Island off the coast of Georgia. Comprising the largest repository ever from Spanish Florida, the beads enlighten archaeologists about past trade routes and provide clues to the social structure and wealth of the…
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- In the classic waterfall illusion, if you stare at the downward motion of a waterfall for some period of time, stationary objects — such as rocks — appear to drift upward. MIT neuroscientists have found that this phenomenon, called motion aftereffect, occurs not only in our visual perception but also in our tactile perception, and that these senses actually influence one another. Put another way, how you feel the world can actually change how you see it — and vice versa.
In a paper published in the April 9 online issue of Current Biology, researchers found that people who…
In the classic waterfall illusion, if you stare at the downward motion of a waterfall for some period of time, stationary objects — like rocks — appear to drift upward. MIT neuroscientists have found that this phenomenon, called motion aftereffect, occurs not only in our visual perception but also in our tactile perception, and that these senses actually influence one another. Put another way, how you feel the world can actually change how you see it — and vice versa.
In a paper published in the April 9 online issue of Current Biology, researchers found that people who were exposed to visual…
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A two-decade surge of legalized gambling is chipping away at U.S. security and military readiness, not just the bank accounts of bettors, a comprehensive new collection of research on the hazards of gambling warns.
Casinos drain money from consumer products and services, weakening the economic engine that ultimately drives defense spending, according to the latest volume in the three-part United States International Gambling Report Series.
"We cannot maintain a strong military presence with a weak economy," said University of Illinois professor John W. Kindt, a national…
Public middle-grades schools placed under private management in 2002 as part of a state-run overhaul of the Philadelphia School District did not keep pace with the rest of the city's public schools, according to a study published in the American Journal of Education.
The study, which tracked schools through 2006, found that test scores had improved in the privatized schools, but scores in the rest of the city's public schools improved at a much faster rate, leaving the privatized schools in the dust.
"By 2006, the achievement gap between the privatized group and the rest of the district was…
LAWRENCE, Kansas — Three professors at the University of Kansas have found that a one-time tax break allowed multinational corporations to receive a 22,000 percent average return on lobbying expenditures.
The study was conducted by Raquel Meyer Alexander, assistant professor of accounting; Stephen Mazza, associate dean of the School of Law; and Susan Scholz, associate professor of accounting and Harper Faculty Fellow. Mazza recently presented their findings at the Critical Tax Theory Conference, sponsored by the Indiana University Maurer School of Law in Bloomington.
A recent tax law change…
Session: Advances in science, engineering, public policy and hazard mitigation as a result of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.
Location: DeAnza Ballroom 1, Thursday, April 9, 2009, 1:30 p.m.
The Loma Prieta earthquake transformed the earthquake sciences and engineering and remains a major focus of study, some twenty years later. The 17 October 1989 magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake severely shook the San Francisco and Monterey Bay regions and initiated major changes in earthquake science and engineering, disaster response and public policy well beyond California.
The 1989 earthquake…
Seismologists are re-evaluating the earthquake potential of the Central Coast, a very complex tectonic region located west of the San Andreas Fault, between Monterey Bay and the Western Transverse Ranges. This area of increasing population growth ranks as one of the top 40 U.S. metropolitan areas with significant earthquake risk.
Speakers from the US Geological Survey, PG&E and academia will compare fresh data to illuminate the complexity of faulting in the central California coastal region.
Three talks will use separate datasets to focus on the California Central Ranges, Hosgri Fault…
Patient-to-patient transmission of hepatitis B virus (HBV) can occur as the result of routine clinical practices incorrectly thought to be risk-free. A review of 33 HBV outbreaks, published in the open access journal BMC Medicine, has shown that the most frequent HBV transmission routes are administration of drugs using multi-vial compounds and capillary blood sampling (e.g. for glucose monitoring) using non-disposable devices.
Simone Lanini led a team of researchers from the Istituto Nazionale per le Malattie Infettive Lazzaro Spallanzani, Rome, who performed a systematic review of HBV…
Edmonton—A University of Alberta researcher is lead author on a paper that reaches back billions of years to establish a new link between nickel, methane gas and the evolution of complex life forms on Earth.
Kurt Konhauser, professor of geomicrobiology at the U of A, and an international team of researchers came together for the paper that will be published in Nature on April 9.
Konhauser and his team have a new theory on what caused the decline of methane producing bacteria 2.7 billion years ago and the subsequent rise of oxygen levels. This new paper shows that as the planet's mantle…