In a 17-year experiment on Vermont’s Camel’s Hump, three Dartmouth researchers find that lead moves very slowly though the soil. Using the highly accurate technique of isotopic analysis for the first time at this field site, the researchers traced several varieties of lead with different atomic weights.

Their study was published online on July 12 on the Environmental Science & Technology Web site, a journal of the American Chemical Society.

“This definitively supports a few

In the fishbowl of life, when hordes of well-fed predators drive their prey to the brink of extinction, sometimes evolution takes the fast track to help the hunted survive — and then thrive to outnumber their predators.

This rapid evolution, predicted by Cornell University biologists in computer models and demonstrated with Pac-Man-like creatures and their algae food in laboratory habitats called chemostats, could play an important role in the ecological dynamics of many predator-

Microscopes are not the only tools available to study disease. A new ESA project employs satellites to predict and help combat epidemic outbreaks, as well as join the hunt for the origin of the deadly Ebola virus.

Ebola haemorrhagic fever kills many people in Central Africa each year. It can cause runaway internal and external bleeding in humans and also apes. What remains unidentified is the jungle-based organism serving as the virus’s host.
To assist search efforts, from next y

Researchers at Purdue University are creating interactive software that artists could use to make realistic animations of cloud formations, explosions, smoke, steam, fog and other gaseous phenomena for movies and video games.

The same software might also be used by meteorologists to create accurate representations of quickly developing weather conditions. Because the software is interactive, it shows results immediately, whereas conventional programs might take hours to complete such anim

Oxford scientists have found the first sign that many patients with type 2 diabetes have something wrong with their hearts which has previously been undetected.

More than 90 per cent of all diabetics have type 2 diabetes, and researchers studying a group of type 2 diabetics with no apparent heart problems discovered that their hearts were actually working significantly less efficiently than non-diabetic individuals.

Professor Kieran Clarke led the study at Oxford. “We used

ESA PR 44-2003. A unique view of our home planet and its natural satellite – the Moon – is one of the first data sets coming from ESA’’s Mars Express.

“It is very good news for the mission,” says ESA’’s Mars Express Project Scientist, Agustin Chicarro. These and other data, such as those recording the major constituents of Earth as seen from space, are the actual proof that the instruments on board Mars Express, launched 2 June 2003, are working perfectly.
The routine check-outs