A study looking at why clouds make the air near them glow more brightly suggests climate models may need to be revised.
Atmospheric scientists already account for the brighter air close to clouds, thanks to a 2007 study by Ilan Koren and his colleagues at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. The team showed that cloud droplets, attached to dust and smoke particles, float in a halo kilometres wide around clouds, bouncing sunlight back out of the atmosphere. Seen from a satellite, that means air close to clouds looks brighter.
Read the rest of the story on Nature’s new site: [html]
Researchers could cut the use of animals in their experiments by changing the way they analyze their results, according to a study by scientists based in Germany and the United States.
In a typical animal experiment, researchers will try to standardize factors such as the animals’ genetic backgrounds and laboratory conditions to make it as easy as possible for other researchers to reproduce their results later. Now, a team led by Hanno Würbel at the Justus-Liebig-University in Giessen, Germany, has reanalyzed a study of mouse behaviour by taking such genetic and environmental variations into account, and they got fewer spurious results, or false positives, than the initial study.
Read the article at Nature News [html] or here [pdf]
A French-Russian mathematician has won the Abel Prize today for his work on advanced forms of geometry.
The winner of the 6 million Norwegian kroner (US$920,000) prize, Mikhail Leonidovich Gromov, has held a permanent appointment at the Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies (IHES) outside Paris since 1982.
Read the rest of the news story on Nature News [html]or here [pdf]
First, use a tripod. That was Melissa Lutz Blouin’s take-home message about making video, which she delivered during a session on the topic at ScienceWriters 2008 in October in Palo Alto. “Your production values shoot up!” she exclaimed. The cost barriers for video have dropped from the days of $60,000 shoulder-mounted film cameras, but as anyone who has shot with today’s $2,000 cameras knows, there is more to getting a professional result than just using professional equipment.
The rest of my article on the workshop is available to members of the National Association of Science Writers on their website: [html] or here [pdf]
Journalist covering global development by way of science and technology.