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POPSRepairPal: Yes, your mechanic is ripping you off To drive home his point, Sturtz told me about a study the company did when it was forming: 50 calls were made to shops asking for a price quote on a given repair. Then, a short time later, the calls were made again to the same shops, but this time with women making the queries instead of men. The average price difference was 17 percent higher when women called.
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POPSTrio Of Super-Earths: Harvest Of Low-mass Exoplanets Discovered With HARPS "Clearly these planets are only the tip of the iceberg," says Mayor. "The analysis of all the stars studied with HARPS shows that about one third of all solar-like stars have either super-Earth or Neptune-like planets with orbital periods shorter than 50 days." A planet in a tight, short-period orbit is indeed easier to find than one in a wide, long-period orbit. "It is most probable that there are many other planets present: not only super-Earth and Neptune-like planets with longer periods, but also Earth-like planets that we cannot detect yet. Add to it the Jupiter-like planets already known, and you may well arrive at the conclusion that planets are ubiquitous," concludes Udry.
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POPSGlobal Network Of Telescopes Simulates 6,000-mile Wide Telescope "These results are very significant for the advance of radio astronomy," said JIVE director Huib Jan van Langevelde. "It shows not only that telescopes of the future can be developed in worldwide collaboration, but that they can also be operated as truly global instruments." EXPReS, funded by the European Commission, aims to connect up to 16 of the world's most sensitive radio telescopes to the JIVE processor to correlate VLBI data in real time. This replaces the traditional VLBI method of shipping data on disk and provides astronomers with observational data in a matter of hours rather than weeks, allowing them to respond rapidly to transient events with follow-up observations.
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POPSNew Space Telescope to Explore the Unknown Perhaps most exciting is the possibility that GLAST will find something no one is expecting. This space telescope can peer a range of high-energy gamma rays that is virtually unexplored. "There's such a leap forward in capabilities with GLAST that we have a really good chance of discovering things not even on the list yet," Ritz said. The mission is scheduled for liftoff atop a Delta 2 rocket at 11:45 a.m. EDT on June 7.
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POPSPharmaceutical Fountain of Youth Could Cost Pennies Five years ago, Sinclair, a Harvard University professor and co-founder of Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, discovered the molecule resveratrol. It targets a gene activated by calorically restricted diets, which have extended the lifespans of laboratory animals from yeast to monkeys.
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POPSBdelloids can take advantage of the entire environmental metagenome Nearly all other multicellular animals have strong safeguards against foreign DNA, but bdelloids' seeming embrace of genetic detritus is in keeping with their general quirkiness: Shunning sex and entirely lacking males, the ubiquitous creatures are also extraordinarily resistant to radiation, as Meselson and Gladyshev demonstrated earlier this year in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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POPSHow Stem Cells Decide What They'll Become They began by examining populations of seemingly identical blood stem cells, and found that a cell marker of "stemness," a protein called Sca-1, was actually present in highly variable amounts from cell to cell -- in fact, they found a 1,000-fold range. One might think that low Sca-1 cells are simply those cells that have spontaneously differentiated. However, when Huang and Chang divided the cells expressing low, medium and high levels of Sca-1 and cultured them, each descendent cell population recapitulated the same broad range of Sca-1 levels over nine days or more, regardless of what levels they started with. Blood stem cells with low levels of Sca-1 differentiated into red blood cell progenitors seven times more often than cells high in Sca-1 when exposed to erythropoietin, a growth factor that promotes red blood cell production.
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POPSAt Ten, Dark Energy "Most Profound Problem" in Physics A decade later, a new suite of experiments may pin down the properties of dark energy and solve what some experts are calling "the most profound problem" in modern physics. "This is game-changing science," Michael Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago, told a packed auditorium during the Decade of Dark Energy Symposium held last week at STScI. "We've gone from establishing the phenomenon to probing the underlying cause," he said. "We're not anywhere near the point where it's time to give dark energy a rest."
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POPSFirefox 3 has arrived A must for heavy web users :) * Note that this is a release "candidate", meaning it's not fully official yet (but haven't we waited long enough? ;)).
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