Applied Physics

Is baseball biased toward left-handed pitchers? Indeed it is, says David A. Peters, Ph.D., McDonnell Douglas Professor of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis (and uber baseball fan) and he says he has the data to prove it. There's no question left-handed pitchers, even less than great ones, can last a long time in baseball. But 90 percent of the world is right-handed yet only 75 percent of baseball players are. Is that because left-handed pitchers do better against right-handed hitters so teams develop more left-handed hitters toi counter that or is it part of a vast, left-hand…

ARNHEM, The Netherlands, July 7 /PRNewswire/ -- ARCADIS (EURONEXT: ARCAD), the international consultancy, design, engineering and management services company, announced today that it has acquired SET, an Italian company specialized in environmental consulting services. SET has gross revenues of approximately EUR 9 million and margins above the target margin of ARCADIS for the environmental business line. ARCADIS acquired the shares from the management and an external shareholder. Further financial details were not disclosed. SET, established in 1994 and based in Bolzano and Milan, provides a…

A dynamic way to alter the shape and size of microscopic three-dimensional structures built out of proteins has been developed by biological chemist Jason Shear and his former graduate student Bryan Kaehr at The University of Texas at Austin. Shear and Kaehr fabricated a variety of detailed three-dimensional microstructures, known as hydrogels, and have shown that they can expand and bend the hydrogels by altering the chemistry of the environment in which they were built. Hydrogels have been in development over the last couple of decades and are being used as parts in biology-based…

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Virginia, July 3 /PRNewswire/ -- Northrop Grumman Corporation's (NYSE: NOC) Sperry Marine business unit has recently unveiled a new integrated desktop marine radar designed to meet the latest International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) performance standards. The new Sperry Marine VisionMaster FT(TM) 250 is designed to comply with the IEC 62388 CAT 2 technical requirements and meets the International Maritime Organization (IMO) carriage requirements for vessels of 5,000 to 10,000 gross tonnage. Sperry Marine plans to offer the product in radar-only and chart-radar…

HELSINKI, July 3 /PRNewswire/ -- Wartsila has acquired the global ship design group Vik-Sandvik, a leading independent group providing design and engineering services to ship owners and the ship building industry worldwide. The value of the acquisition is EUR 132 millions, with an additional maximum sum of EUR 38 million to be paid based on the performance of the business over the next three years. In 2007, Vik-Sandvik's turnover was EUR 55 millions and the profitability is on a very good level. The number of employees is 410. This acquisition is a major step in Wartsila's strategy to…

A giant rubber anaconda could be a step on the road to meeting a large chunk of our energy needs using carbon-free, wave-generated electricity. The 'Anaconda' is named after the snake of the same name because of its long thin shape. It is closed at both ends and filled completely with water and then anchored just below the sea's surface, with one end facing the oncoming waves. A wave hitting the end squeezes it and causes a 'bulge wave'(a wave of pressure produced when a fluid oscillates forwards and backwards inside a tube) to form inside the tube. As the bulge wave runs through the tube,…

WAALWIJK, The Netherlands, July 3 /PRNewswire/ -- The management of DOCDATA N.V. today announces that the Group will publish the consolidated figures for the first half of the 2008 financial year on Tuesday 29 July 2008 by issuing a press release at 07.30AM Amsterdam time, before opening hours of the stock exchange. Consequently, the management will discuss the 2008 half-year results in a meeting for which both financial press and analysts will be invited, to be held at 10.30AM Amsterdam time in the Mercurius room of the Financieel Nieuwscentrum Beursplein 5 of NYSE Euronext Amsterdam (…

Thanks to salt and hot chili peppers, researchers have found what tells a roundworm to go forward toward dinner or turn to broaden the search. It's a computational mechanism, they say, that is similar to what drives hungry college students to a pizza. Yes, college students have the calculus center of a worm. These behavior-driving calculations are done "in a tiny, specialized computer inside a primitive roundworm," says principal investigator Shawn Lockery, a University of Oregon biologist and member of the UO Institute of Neuroscience. In the paper, the researchers documented how two related…

A woman in southern Ontario is one of the first cases in Canada of a rare neurological syndrome in which a person starts speaking with a different accent, McMaster University researchers report in the July issue of the Canadian Journal of Neurological Sciences. The puzzling medical phenomenon known as foreign-accent syndrome (FAS) arises from neurological damage, and results in vocal distortions that typically sound like the speaker has a new, "foreign" accent. This particular case, however, is even more unusual because the English-speaking woman did not acquire an accent that sounds foreign…

PARIS and SAN FRANCISCO, July 2 /PRNewswire/ -- - Yoono Comes Out Of Private Beta in Time for Release of Firefox 3 Yoono, a leader in developing solutions to simplify your Internet life and save you time, and Assurances Generales de France (AGF) announced today AGF has extended the Series A with an additional US$4 million investment. AGF originally invested US$2.5 million in Yoono in 2007. Yoono also announced the opening of its beta product to the public and support for the release of Firefox 3. Yoono socializes your browser by becoming "a platform of widgets" that helps users manage all of…