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Submission + - Tomatoes thrive on urine, study finds (cosmosmagazine.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 16, 2009 @12:45AM

An anonymous reader writes: Using human urine as a fertiliser produces bumper crops of tomatoes that are safe to eat, scientists have found. Their research was published last month in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry and may help cheaply boost crops in the developing world.

Submission + - Captured comet becomes moon of Jupiter (cosmosmagazine.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 14, 2009 @02:17AM

An anonymous reader writes: Jupiter's gravity captured a comet in the mid-20th century, holding it in orbit as a temporary moon for 12 years. The comet, named 147P/Kushida-Muramatsu, is the fifth body known to have been pulled by Jupiter from its orbit around the Sun. The discovery adds to our understanding of how Jupiter interferes with objects from the 'Hilda group', which are asteroids and comets with orbits related to Jupiter's orbit.

Samsung System Tailors Ads To Its Audience 172

Posted by timothy on Sunday September 06, 2009 @10:04PM from the you'd-like-a-philip-k-dick-book dept.

angry tapir writes "Samsung has developed an outdoor digital advertising system that tailors ads based on its audience. There are three main components of the system: an LCD display panel, a dual lens camera and a processing computer, which runs the company's proprietary facial recognition software. If the technology identifies several female members in a group, then it can target advertisements at them, for example. Even if the group is mixed, the technology can identify whether onlookers are children or adults. If they're adults then maybe a wine ad could run whereas an advertisement for toys might play for kids."

Submission + - Nicotine improves brain function in schizophrenics (cosmosmagazine.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 06, 2009 @09:23PM

An anonymous reader writes: Nicotine enhances attention and memory in schizophrenics, says a study that supports the development of new treatments which could relieve symptoms and prevent smoking-related deaths.

A strong link between schizophrenia and smoking — with over three times as many schizophrenics smoking (70 to 90%) as the population at large — prompted scientists to investigate the link.

Researchers led by Ruth Barr, a psychiatrist at Queen's University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, set out to find if the nicotine in cigarettes was helping patients to overcome their difficulties with cognitive function, such as planning and memory in social and work settings.

Submission + - Kilometre-high waves flow in Saturn's rings (cosmosmagazine.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 15, 2009 @09:10PM

An anonymous reader writes: NASA's Cassini probe has uncovered for the first time towering vertical structures in Saturn's otherwise flat rings that are attributable to the gravitational effects of a small moon.

"We thought that this vertical structure was pretty neat when we first saw it in our simulations," said John Weiss, the paper's lead author at the Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations in the U.S. city of Boulder, Colorado. "But it's a million times cooler to have your theory supported by such gorgeous images. It makes you suspect you might be doing something right," added teammate and co-author Carolyn Porco.

Submission + - Human laughter up to 16 million years old (cosmosmagazine.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 05, 2009 @02:51AM

An anonymous reader writes: Tickle a baby chimpanzee and it will giggle just like a human infant. This is because laughter evolved millions of years ago in one of our common ancestors, say scientists.

Published today in the journal Current Biology, a new study shows that laughter is not a unique human trait, but a behaviour shared by all great apes.

Submission + - Dinosaur posture still wrong, says study (cosmosmagazine.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 01, 2009 @10:30PM

An anonymous reader writes: The current depiction of the way giant sauropod dinosaurs held their necks is probably wrong, says a new study.

"For the last decade the reigning paradigm in palaeontology has been that the big sauropod dinosaurs held their necks out straight and their heads down low," said co-author Matt Wedel, who researches biomechanics at the Western University of Health Sciences in Pomona, California.

But "our research [now] suggests that this view of sauropods is simply incorrect, based on everything we know about living animals," he said.