America may be a melting pot, but the result is generally more stew than fondue; for many of us, where we came from—whether by boat or ice bridge—constitutes a significant part of our identity. Beyond whatever social implications it may have, our heritage slumbers within us in ways we don’t fully understand, yet are fascinated by.
It’s no wonder commercial genetic ancestry tests are so appealing. Still, a little caveat emptor is in order: According to an article in the journal Science, consumers who plop down their Benjamins for genetic answers may not be getting what they bargained for.
For some time now, conventional computer memory has been heading toward a crunch—a physical limit of how much storage can be crammed into a space before it is overwhelmed by heat and power problems. Generally, researchers have tried to avert this heat death in two ways: leapfrogging to the next generation of memory or refining current memory.
Researchers at Arizona State University’s Center for Applied Nanoionics (CANi) have combined the two approaches to create new memory that amps up performance while remaining compatible with today’s devices. CANi also used nanoionics (a technique for moving tiny bits of matter around on a chip) to overcome the limitations of conventional electronics: Instead of moving electrons among ions, nanoionics moves the ions themselves.
Infant stars (pink) in the Serpens region, captured by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope (only somewhat relevant, but still cool).
Using NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes, an international team of astronomers have found nine of the smallest, faintest, most compact galaxies ever observed in the early universe–the building blocks of today’s larger, older galaxies. Composed of millions of brilliant blue stars, each infantile galaxy is one-hundredth to one-thousandth as large as our Milky Way galaxy. They formed about 12.5 billion years ago – just 1 billion years after the “Big Bang.”
Such galaxies are consistent with the conventional model of galactic formation, which holds that larger galaxies are formed when younger, smaller, less-massive galaxies merge. The sighting thus offers some much-needed support for the “hierarchical model,” which has become ever more contentious in recent years.
J.R.R. Tolkien may have talked up their hairy feet, but it’s hobbits’ wrists that interest anthropologists. In this article, I look at how an international team of researchers used Arizona State University’s cutting-edge imaging technology to crack the mystery of Homo floresiensis, a three-foot-tall, 18,000-year-old skeleton nicknamed the “hobbit.”
