What is actually a “good” oyster? How can we evaluate and grade ”quality”? And how can we produce the quality we wish?
The European flat oyster has been used as food as long as man has inhabited the European coastline. The ancient Romans established oyster farms, and oyster culture and harvest gradually developed as an important activity along the coasts of Europe. Today, the oyster industry is important. The Pacific oyster, which is now the dominant species, is cultivated all ove
A team of University of Florida researchers has invented a way to rapidly detect traces of TNT or other hidden explosives simply by shining a light on any potentially contaminated object, from a speck of dust in the air to the surface of a suitcase. “We have to find explosives quickly, inexpensively and, particularly, reliably,” said Rolf Hummel, a UF professor emeritus of materials science and engineering who heads the lab where the method was invented.
The development provides in
Tracking newly discovered asteroids and comets to identify their orbits is the work of a small number of observatories. Yet UK students, using the Faulkes Telescope North – a remotely operated research quality telescope dedicated for educational use – will now be swelling these ranks. The students have taken such accurate data of a number of asteroids that the telescope has been awarded an observatory code and can now submit official data to the international body that monitors asteroids and comets,
A new class of very small handheld devices can detect motion a thousand times more subtly than any tool known.
“There was nothing in the [optics] literature to predict that this would happen,” says Sandia National Laboratories researcher Dustin Carr of his groups device, which reflects a bright light from a very small moving object.
Sandia is a National Nuclear Security Administration laboratory.
Carr, who earlier gained fame as a graduate student at Cornell
In the midst of crammed slums in the Nicaraguan district of Matagalpa, aid workers are hunting house-to-house for hidden killers, their search guided by high-resolution satellite imagery supplied through an ESA-backed project.
Their targets are blood-sucking reduviid insects, generally known as ’kissing bugs’ because they emerge from their hiding places each night to bite human skin where it is thinnest – around the mouth and eyes. Growing up to five centimetres long, the kissing bug
A dedicated team of scientists is spending the next four weeks in northern Chile’s Atacama Desert. They are studying the scarce life that exists there and, in the process, helping NASA learn more about how primitive life forms could exist on Mars.
The NASA-funded researchers are studying the Atacama Desert, described as the most arid region on Earth, to understand the desert as a habitat that represents one of the limits of life on Earth. The project, part of NASA’s Astrobiology