Archive by date | March 2011

Audacious notion of the week: planets heated by dark matter

Audacious notion of the week: planets heated by dark matter

It’s dark outside, permanently. The sun twinkles in the distance barely bigger than other stars. But the ground is warm, and oceans are teaming with life. That’s the scenario envisioned by Dan Hooper and Jason Steffen of Fermi National Laboratory in Batavia Illinois, who released a preprint yesterday about the possibility of dark matter heating planets that are otherwise too far from their host stars to be habitable.  Read more

€850 million for 6 French university-hospital centres

€850 million for 6 French university-hospital centres

The French medical research landscape will be transformed with the announcement by the French government today of the six winners in a competiton for an €850 million fund designed to regroup labs from research hospitals, universities and the national biomedical research agency in a few centres of excellence in medical research.

Vaccine alliance halts funds, steps up transparency

The GAVI Alliance, which focuses on getting vaccines into low-income countries, has announced that it will suspend cash handouts to some programmes in Niger, Cote d’Ivoire and Cameroon, while it investigates possible misuse of funds. Together with another investigation in Mali – which the Geneva-based global health partnership’s board had already been told about – some $18 million is being looked at.

Updated: Physicists deal with aftermath of underground fire

Updated: Physicists deal with aftermath of underground fire

Researchers have completed an inspection of damage at the underground physics lab closed due to fire on March 17, says the lab’s director. The Soudan Underground Laboratory of the University of Minnesota was shut down for ten days after fire broke out in the timbers lining an elevator shaft that serves the lab site, located on level 27 of the mine, which is 710 metres underground (the underground location shields out cosmic rays that would act as a source of background noise for experiments in the lab). After going back in for the first time yesterday, lab staff found some damage from firefighting foam forced down the shaft that burst open the doors to the lab, and are reckoning with a need for substantial clean-up to remove debris from the fire that was brought in, says lab director Marvin Marshak.  Read more

Twitter advice for profs: keep it personal

Twitter advice for profs: keep it personal

From the night’s television to what the cat dragged in, professors who want to gain credibility with their students should give up tweeting scholarly material and instead concentrate on tweeting social snippets of their lives. At least this is the message from a new study of 120 undergraduate students published in the current issue of the journal Learning, Media and Technology.

FDA chemist charged with insider trading

FDA chemist charged with insider trading

Few are better placed to beat the market – illegally – than employees intimately involved with new drug marketing approvals at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The temptation was apparently too much for Cheng Yi Liang, a 57-year-old chemist in FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER), the agency power center that approves new drugs (building at right).  Read more

Mercury, as seen from orbit

Mercury, as seen from orbit

Mercury, the solar system’s smallest planet and a font of geophysical enigmas, is now squarely in researcher’s sights. On 29 March, NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft radioed back the first ever images taken from orbit around Mercury, including never-before-seen portions of the planet’s far southern regions.

Digitizing Jane Goodall’s legacy at Duke

Digitizing Jane Goodall's legacy at Duke

Fifty years ago, in the summer of 1960–the same year that a U.S. satellite snapped the first photo of the Earth from space, the same year that the CERN particle accelerator became operational, the same year that the Beatles got their name–a 26-year-old Jane Goodall got on a plane in London and went for the first time to Gombe Stream Game Reserve, in Tanzania. She carried with her only a notebook and some old binoculars. Almost every day since the day Goodall arrived there in July 1960, somebody has been watching the chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) of what is now called Gombe National Park, carefully recording their every movement.