Explorers in the 1800s discovered through fossils that deciduous forests once covered the poles, but researchers still do not know why leaf-dropping trees were preferred over evergreens.

“The dominant idea since the 1940s was that because of the polar light regime of continuous darkness and warmth, leafless branches had an advantage over evergreen canopies in the polar forests,” says Dana Royer, research associate in geosciences, Penn State.

This carbon loss hypothesis states that

Achievement Could Improve Understanding of Superconductivity

A team of researchers at JILA, a joint institute of the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado at Boulder, has done the physics equivalent of efficiently turning yin into yang. They changed individual potassium atoms belonging to a class of particles called fermions into molecules that are part of a fundamentally different class of particles known as bosons

RIT study analyzes impacts of future transportation

Move over gas-guzzlers. The year is 2025 and 50 percent of all vehicles are electrically powered. Hybrid electrics, pure electrics and fuel cell vehicles share the road with the conventional gasoline-driven variety.

A recent study by James Winebrake, chair of public policy at Rochester Institute of Technology, analyzed this hypothetical transportation future and found economic benefits exceeding billions of dollars annuall

Scientists at the University of Reading are leading a consortium (universities of Reading, Cardiff and Southampton, and the Natural History Museum) that is developing a “virtual laboratory” to help researchers around the world make sense of the mass of diverse, incomplete and often incompatible databases available on different species, according to an article published in the July edition of BBSRC business.

One species covered by the scientists is the yellow-flowered Spanish Broom which is

The University of Bradford has conducted a study that reveals that mobile phone use can improve the short-term memory of men – but not women.

Dr Jim Smythe and Professor Brenda Costall of the University’’s School of Life Sciences carried out an experiment on both the long and short-term memory of people that were briefly exposed to electromagnetic fields (EMF) emitted from mobile telephones.

Thirty-three male and twenty-nine female students volunteered to be randomly assigne

Researchers from Myongji University, Korea, have developed a way to improve liquid crystal displays (LCD), which could revolutionise display technology. Published today in the Institute of Physics journal Semiconductor Science and Technology, Professor Yong-Sang Kim and his team propose a new structure for polycrystalline silicon thin film transistors (poly-Si TFT), which makes them more reliable when used in active matrix liquid crystal displays (AMLCD), like those on lap top screens and television