A novel method for the design and manufacture of sensors to measure the temperature and relative humidity of the air, the pH of solutions or the refractive index of liquids based on optic fibre has been devised at the Public University of Navarre.

The sensors are small devices capable of capturing both physical and chemical signals from the surrounding environment and converting them into electrical signals for their subsequent processing. The information thus transformed can be easi

Women with breast cancer are five times as likely to have pesticide residues in their blood of organochlorines (DDT), which contain oestrogens, reveals a study of 159 women in Occupational and Environmental Medicine.

The possibility of such a link has attracted controversy, admit the authors, but say that their new study adds to the growing body of evidence for an association between environmental oestrogens and the rising incidence of breast cancer.

The authors base their findings

New research dismisses a widely held assumption about how cells grow

Research published today in Journal of Biology challenges an assumption about cell growth that underpins modern cellular biology. Ian Conlon and Martin Raff, of University College London, show that mammalian cells do not regulate their size in the way scientists have assumed they do since the 1970s.
Conlon and Raff conducted a series of experiments, using Schwann cells from the sciatic nerve of rats, to establish

In honor of the Earth Day celebration, NASA scientists unveiled the first consistent and continuous global measurements of Earth’s “metabolism.” Data from the Terra and Aqua satellites are helping scientists frequently update maps of the rate at which plant life on Earth is absorbing carbon out of the atmosphere.

Combining space-based measurements of a range of plant properties collected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) with a suite of other satellite and su

Karaoke may never be the same, thanks to research being presented in Nashville detailing the latest findings in efforts to create a computerized system that makes average singers sound like professionals.

“Our ultimate goal is to have a computer system that will transform a poor singing voice into a great singing voice,” said Mark J.T. Smith, a professor and head of Purdue University’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

To that end Smith, a former faculty member at

It might be 500,000 years or five years, but the Central Valley of Costa Rica will definitely experience major volcanic activity again, according to Phillip B. Gans, professor of geology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He presented a study of volcanic rocks of Costa Rica in his recent talk at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America.

“The Costa Ricans were not around for the last big one, but it’s inevitable,” said Gans. “Another pyroclastic flow like the