The 10th annual American Lung Association State of the Air report released April 29 finds that six out of ten Americans–186.1 million people — live in areas where air pollution levels endanger lives.  State of the Air 2009 acknowledges substantial progress against air pollution in many areas of the country, but finds nearly every major city still burdened by air pollution. Despite...

An extremely deep Chandra X–ray Observatory image of a region near the center of our Galaxy has resolved a long-standing mystery about an X-ray glow along the plane of the Galaxy. The glow in the region covered by the Chandra image was discovered to be caused by hundreds of point-like X-ray sources, implying that the glow along the plane of the Galaxy is due to millions of such sources. Thi...

For the past two years, a team of UCLA Egyptologists, digital modelers, web designers, staff and students has been building a three-dimensional virtual-reality model of the ancient Egyptian religious site known as Karnak, one of the largest temple complexes ever constructed. The result is Digital Karnak, a high-tech model that runs in real time and allows users to navigate 2,000 years of history a...

Fossilised corals from tropical Tahiti show that the behaviour of ice sheets is much more volatile and dynamic than previously thought, a team led by Oxford University scientists has found. Analysis of the corals suggests that ice sheets can change rapidly over just hundreds of years – events associated with sea level rises of several metres over the same period. It also shows that a natural...

The Lost World, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle`s account of an isolated community of dinosaurs that survived the catastrophic extinction event 65 million years ago, has no less appeal now than it did when it was written a century ago. Various Hollywood versions have tried to recreate the lost world of dinosaurs, but today the fiction seems just a little closer to reality. New scientific evidence suggests ...

Living beings and inanimate phenomena may have more in common than previously thought. At least that is the view of Duke University engineer Adrian Bejan and Penn State biologist James Marden. What they believe connects the two worlds is a theory that flow systems – from animal locomotion to the formation of river deltas — evolve in time to balance and minimize imperfections. Flows evo...

For two decades, researchers have been using a growing volume of genetic data to debate whether ancestors of Native Americans emigrated to the New World in one wave or successive waves, or from one ancestral Asian population or a number of different populations. Now, after painstakingly comparing DNA samples from people in dozens of modern-day Native American and Eurasian groups, an international ...

Every dog and cat knows that scratching relieves an itch. But for ages, not even neuroscientists knew why. Now, a University of Minnesota study shows that scratching turns off activity in spinal cord nerves that transmit the itching sensation to the brain. The researchers hope eventually to learn just how the inhibition works. That in turn could lead to new ways of duplicating the benefits of scra...

Comets have always fascinated us. In early cultures, a mysterious appearance of a comet could symbolize a deity`s displeasure with humankind or mean a sure failure in battle, at least for one side. Now Tel Aviv University research adds a new twist to that fascination: comets might have provided the elements for the emergence of life on our planet. While investigating the chemical make-up of comets...

Researchers at North Carolina State University have used a mathematical model that allows them to get a clearer picture of the galaxy`s youngest supernova remnant by correcting for the distortions caused by cosmic dust. Their new data provides evidence that this remnant is from a type Ia supernova — the explosion of a white dwarf star — and raises questions about the ways in which magn...