Engineers from NASA and Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne successfully completed a series of hot-fire altitude tests using liquid methane on the RS-18 engine, which was last used to lift astronauts off the moon's surface 36 years ago and was originally flown with storable hypergolic propellants during the Apollo moon missions.

The tests, conducted at White Sands test facility in New Mexico, are part of the technology development for NASA's Constellation program, and gathered important data on ignition, performance measurement, and rapid start and stop.

The RS-18 engine has been modified to burn liquid oxygen and liquid methane, providing increased safety and performance to future space vehicles.

Ramadan is a Muslim religious observance in which participants do not eat or drink anything from dawn until sunset.

Researchers from the departments of Department of Nutrition and Bromatology and Department of Chemistry-Physics of the University of Granada have carried out a study in which they have revealed the need of counterbalancing the diet of the population who follow Ramadan.

According to the collected data, in this period of time macronutrient consumption levels are not appropriate if compared with the reference recommendations. The number of daily ingestions drops to 2 or 3, with regard to the 4 or 5 ingestions of the rest of the population in this period. In addition, scientists have established that, because of the diet, corporal fat increases and muscular mass falls.

Mammalian fatty acid synthase is one of the most complex molecular synthetic machines in human cells. It is also a promising target for the development of anti-cancer and anti-obesity drugs and the treatment of metabolic disorders. Now researchers at ETH Zurich have determined the atomic structure of a mammalian fatty acid synthase. Their results have just been published in Science magazine.

Synthesis of fatty acids is a central cellular process that has been studied for many decades. Fatty acids are used in the cell as energy storage compounds, messenger molecules and building blocks for the cellular envelope. Until now, individual steps of this process have been investigated using isolated bacterial enzymes. However, in higher organisms – except plants – fatty acid synthesis is catalyzed by large multifunctional proteins where many individual enzymes are brought together to form a "molecular assembly line".

Bats' ability to echolocate may have evolved more than once, according to research published this week by Queen Mary, University of London scientists.

Species of bat with the ability to echolocate do not all group together in the evolutionary tree of life - some are more related to their non-echolocating cousins, the fruit bats. This has raised the question of whether echolocation in bats has evolved more than once, or whether the fruit bats somehow lost their ability to echolocate.

Staying healthy is a tasteless job. Linseed is said to protect against cancer, for example, but not many people like the taste. Researchers have now isolated the valuable components of the flax seeds so when they are incorporated in bread, cakes or dressings, they support the human organism without leaving an unpleasant aftertaste.

Seriously? Cake that protects against cancer and noodles that lower cholesterol? Throw in cigars that clear our arteries and we'll join the health food bandwagon right now.

Research scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Process Engineering and Packaging IVV in Freising have isolated valuable components of linseed and lupin seeds and experimentally incorporated them in various foodstuffs: the linseed in cakes, bread, dressings and sauces, the lupins in bread, rolls and pasta.

Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., a physician-geneticist and leader of the Human Genome Project, has been awarded with the new Inamori Ethics Prize from the Inamori International Center for Ethics and Excellence at Case Western Reserve University.

In HDTV, increased resolution and picture clarity brings with it an increased volume of data so the tiniest disruptions could mean a distortion in the picture or a loss in signal entirely.

An extension of the H.264/AVC format called SVC (scalable video coding) claims to fix that.

Protecting data packets so they are not at risk during transmission poses a serious problem for developers of video coding techniques. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications, Heinrich-Hertz-Institut, HHI in Berlin are therefore working to improve standardized video coding techniques such as the H.264/AVC format, which is used by the YouTube video portal and Apple's QuickTime player, for example. If an Internet node is overloaded, for instance, data packets are randomly discarded during transmission. This causes a jerky picture.

Unlike the social sciences, which are overwhelmingly women, and life sciences, which are about 50-50, the hard sciences have a true gender disparity and the search is always on for reasons why.

Most parents and many teachers believe that if middle-school and high-school girls show no interest in science or math, there's little anyone can do about it but new research indicates that self-confidence instilled by parents and teachers is more important for young girls than their initial interest.

While interest is certainly a factor in getting older girls to study and pursue a career in these disciplines, more attention should be given to building confidence in their abilities early in their education, says University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee Distinguished Professor Nadya Fouad. She is one of the authors of a three-year study aimed at identifying supports and barriers that steer girls toward or away from science and math during their education.

It's a high-priority question for members of organizations like the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Research Council as they ponder how to improve the numbers of women in STEM careers – science, technology, engineering and math.

Women with hormone-receptor positive, metastatic breast cancer may take medications for years to help keep their cancer at bay, but when the tumor becomes resistant to anti-hormonal drugs, treatment with chemotherapy becomes the only option. But a study presented today at the 2008 ASCO Breast Cancer Symposiummay change this approach.

You may have seen projections by some scientists of global seas rising by 20 feet or more by the end of this century as a result of warming, and you may have seen others projecting less than two feet in a worst case scenario.

Free drug samples provided to physicians by pharmaceutical companies could actually be costing uninsured patients more in the long run, according to a study done by researchers at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center and colleagues.

The retrospective study looked at the prescribing habits of more than 70 physicians in a university-affiliated internal medicine practice in the months immediately before and after the closing of their drug sample closet. The results indicate that the availability of free samples from pharmaceutical companies greatly impacts whether an uninsured patient is given a prescription for a generic or a brand-name drug. The complete findings can be found in the September issue of Southern Medical Journal.

A new Institute of Physics report published Friday, 5 September, 2008, provides the most comprehensive evidence available to confirm that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)’s switch-on, due Wednesday September 10th, poses no threat to anyone.

Nature’s own cosmic rays, they note, regularly produce more powerful particle collisions than those planned within the LHC, which will enable nature’s laws to be studied in controlled experiments.

The LHC Safety Assessment Group have reviewed and updated a study first completed in 2003, which dispels fears of universe-gobbling black holes and of other possibly dangerous new forms of matter, and confirms that the switch-on will be completely safe.

What is a gene?

You'll be forgiven if you have a few definitions. Even scientists define ‘a gene’ in different ways, so it may come as little surprise that the media also have various ways of 'framing' the concept of a gene.

But how journalists 'frame' what you might think are common terms has a very real impact on what readers think, and since more and more readers are becoming accustomed to making voting decisions based on science policy ones, how terms are used, and their context, has become ever more important.

Ferocious debates on genetically modified crops or stem cell research illustrate the importance that genetics and molecular biology have gained in everyday life so it's important that people understand the terms being used; and how they are sometimes misused.

A new study found that trained sexologists could infer a woman's history of vaginal orgasm by observing the way she walks. The study is published in the September 2008 issue of The Journal of Sexual Medicine.

Led by Stuart Brody of the University of the West of Scotland in collaboration with colleagues in Belgium, the study involved 16 female Belgian university students. Subjects completed a questionnaire on their sexual behavior and were then videotaped from a distance while walking in a public place. The videotapes were rated by two professors of sexology and two research assistants trained in the functional-sexological approach to sexology, who were not aware of the women's orgasmic history.

The National Medal of Science is the nation's highest honor for science and engineering.

President George W. Bush has named the recipients of the 2007 National Medal of Science, the nation's highest honor for science and engineering. Honorees will receive the medals at a White House ceremony on Sept. 29, 2008.

"The 2007 National Medal of Science laureates have contributed to American science with their superb research," said Arden L. Bement, Jr., director of the National Science Foundation (NSF). "Their legacies have impacted our lives in numerous ways, from developing new therapies for diseases such as cancer to contributing to the development of the Internet and wireless communications. Their accomplishments reflect the high significance of this award."

WASHINGTON -- A new NASA competition is challenging students in high school and college to research and describe a small, supersonic airliner that could enter commercial service in the next decade.

During the upcoming academic year, individuals and teams of high school students will prepare well-documented short papers describing what needs to be accomplished to make supersonic flight available to commercial passengers by 2020. Advanced curriculum high school students and college participants will prepare longer papers that depict a highly efficient, environmentally friendly commercial aircraft that would emit only low sonic booms and be ready for initial overland service in 2020.

A strange mix of oxygen found in a stony meteorite that exploded February 8, 1969 over Pueblito de Allende, Mexico has puzzled scientists ever since. Small flecks of minerals lodged in the stone and thought to date from the beginning of the solar system have a pattern of oxygen types, or isotopes, that differs from those found in all known planetary rocks, including those from Earth, its Moon and meteorites from Mars.

Now scientists from UC San Diego and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have eliminated one model proposed to explain the anomaly: the idea that light from the early Sun could have shifted the balance of oxygen isotopes in molecules that formed after it turned on. When they beamed light through carbon monoxide gas to form carbon dioxide, the balance of oxygen isotopes in the new molecules failed to shift in ways predicted by the model they report in the September 5 issue of Science.

Astronomical instruments needed to answer crucial questions, such as the search for Earth-like planets or the way the Universe expands, have come a step closer with the first demonstration at the telescope of a new calibration system for precise spectrographs. The method uses a Nobel Prize-winning technology called a 'laser frequency comb', and is published in this week's issue of Science.

"It looks as if we are on the way to fulfil one of astronomers' dreams," says team member Theodor Hänsch, director at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics (MPQ) in Germany. Hänsch, together with John Hall, was awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics for work including the frequency comb technique.

Subtle genetic changes that confer an evolutionary advantage upon a species, such as the dexterity characteristic of the human hand, while difficult to detect and even harder to reproduce in a model system, have nevertheless generated keen interest amongst evolutionary biologists.

Binge drinking (5+ alcoholic beverages at one time) is associated with risky sexual behaviors. A new study is one of the few to examine this association by gender in an urban clinic for sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). Results show that binge drinking among women attending the clinic was linked to unsafe sexual practices – such as multiple partners and anal sex – and high rates of gonorrhea.

"The link between binge drinking and risky sexual behavior is complex," said Heidi E. Hutton, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine as well as corresponding author for the study. "We wanted to examine one component of that relationship, whether binge drinking increased the risk of engaging in sexual behaviors and having STDs. We found gender differences in binge drinking among patients at an STD clinic, and also that binge drinking increased STD risk for women."