Technology

ORLANDO, Florida, April 4, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Miltenyi Biotec today announces the worldwide release and availability of the MACSQuant(R) VYB, a compact, benchtop flow cytometer featuring violet, yellow, and blue lasers, and detection of 10 optical parameters. The MACSQuant VYB enables easy but sophisticated multiparametric analysis of fluorescent protein-expressing cells, stem cell characterization, and much more. With this launch, the leading provider of tools and services for cell separation and analysis technologies extends the scope and power of its flow cytometry business. The…

Open access, where scientists pay a fee to publish so that the public and other scientists can read the study for free, is a negligible issue to most scientists, according to a new research report in The FASEB Journal. In the report, Philip M. Davis from Cornell University says that open access open access leads to increases in downloads, but not to increases in citations (their use), a key factor used in scientific publishing to assess a research article's relative importance and value.  He believes the study will help scientists make informed decisions about where they publish their…

The disaster at the Daiichi nuclear power plant in Fukushima, Japan, is still unfolding. It is still not ensured that the reactors will stay under the partial control achieved. The media keep downplaying the problems, focusing on any good news it can make up: That electricity has been brought to all six reactors is “news” every day again for over a week now. The electricity, although brought in, is still neither connected to most of the reactor blocks, nor do you hear anybody asking what electricity is supposed to do with the broken equipment in those blocks. Actually, the problems are…

You may have heard of a new car with lots of problems referred to as a 'lemon' but not all fruits are bad when it comes to automobiles.  Scientists in Brazil have developed a more effective way to use fibers from these and other plants in a new generation of automotive plastics that are stronger, lighter, and more eco-friendly than plastics now in use, according to their presentation at the National Meeting&Exposition of the American Chemical Society.  Study leader Alcides Leão, Ph.D., said the fibers used to reinforce the new plastics may come from delicate fruits like bananas…

Because of the time difference, many discovered the news of the Tohoku earthquake hours after the 9.0 magnitude tremor was recorded 81 miles off the Japanese East Coast - an earthquake so epic that the resulting tsunami reached across the Pacific and the coasts of America and New Zealand.   But also for much of the waking world, news about the unfolding crisis happened instantaneously - because of the amazing reach of social media.  Since the coastal communities of Mississippi and New Orleans were hit by hurricane Katrina in 2005, the role social media has played has established…

For years now the generic PC was getting somewhat cheaper and that was generally good for science. Lots of PCs are running or assisting in many different ways experiments and measurements in laboratories of many sorts. The generic PC could have been getting much cheaper and perhaps specialized, but the complicated interplay between the dominating operating system and consumer market social aspects lead to the development which simply happened. But somehow everybody in science was happy. Without going into details of the "wars" this time, the direction of this unusual evolution where one…

The weather is a formidable foe for all, save one - the United States Postal Service. Herodotus' words on the New York General Post Office near Penn Station often stand in as the unofficial USPS motto, and for the most part ring true regarding mail delivery. Anyone with a cell phone, on the other hand, is at the mercy of wireless towers. What do you get when you cross mail delivery with intermittent cell service? Text message stamps. To join the craze in putting everything in the entire world on our cell phones, Denmark (and possibly Sweden) is launching a system to allow people to exchange a…

It's Rocket Science, I Tell You! The people of Libya are currently trying to give Gaddafi a rocket. A while back, Gaddafi gave his people a rocket. A british team is currently working on giving the record books a rocket.

Mendeley, which bills itself as the world's largest crowd-sourced research database, today announced the Mendeley API Binary Battle, challenging developers to build an application on top of Mendeley's open database of over 70 million research papers, usage statistics, reader demographics, social tags, and related research recommendations. The prize?  $10,001.  Modeled after Last.fm, Mendeley seeks to use its social reference manager and collaboration platform to make research more productive and transparent. This challenge is all about creating applications that open up its academic…

BRUSSELS and HERAKLION, Greece, March 8, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- The EU's 'cyber security' Agency, ENISA today published a comprehensive study on the botnet threat (networks of ordinary computers controlled by cybercriminals), and how to address it. The report looks at the reliability of botnet size estimates and makes recommendations for all groups involved in the fight against botnets. Alongside the main report the Agency sets out the top 10 key issues for policymakers in - "Botnets:10 Tough Questions" Botnets are networks of computers used without their owners' knowledge for cybercrime such…