Engineers are building inexpensive, tabletop, touch-screen displays and sharing the instructions online.

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The silicon shortage that has kept solar electricity expensive is ending.

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Recent additions to the premier collection of Southern Ocean sediment cores at Florida State University’s Antarctic Marine Geology Research Facility will give international scientists a close-up look at fluctuations that occurred in Antarctica’s ice sheet and marine and terrestrial life as the climate cooled considerably between 20 and 14 million years ago.
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Men exposed to organochlorine pesticide metabolites, such as DDE, had an increased risk of testicular germ cell tumors. Previous research suggested that persistent exposure to organochlorine pesticides may increase the risk for some types of testicular cancer, but that observation had not been replicated in an independent data set.
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Patients in therapy to overcome addictions have a new arena to test their coping skills — the virtual world. A new study found that a virtual reality environment can provide the climate necessary to spark an alcohol craving so that patients can practice how to say “no” in a realistic and safe setting.
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A combination of two targeted drugs–one that blocks protein breakdown and one that activates the programmed cell death pathway–reduces the number of tumor metastases in mouse models of kidney and breast cancer. The combination also prolonged overall survival in mice with kidney cancer. Bortezomib blocks the activity of the proteasome, an enzyme complex which degrades misfolded or unwanted proteins. Bortezomib has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of multiple myeloma, but its activity against solid tumors is still being tested.
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New research adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting that commonalities do indeed exists across synesthaetes. In their own study of 70 synesthaetes, and a reanalysis of 19 more in previously published data, psychologists have found that synesthaetes share certain grapheme-color combinations.
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Scientists from Arizona State University and the University of Oxford, whose work appears in the April 30 advanced online publication of the journal Nature, have synthesized and studied a sophisticated molecule that, under illumination, is sensitive to both the magnitude and the direction of magnetic fields as tiny as the Earth’s, which is, on average, one-twenty thousandth as strong as a refrigerator magnet.
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Researchers believe they can achieve a significant increase in the accuracy of one of the fundamental constants of nature by boosting an electron to an orbit as far as possible from the atomic nucleus that binds it. The experiment could put the modern theory of the atom to the most stringent tests yet.
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Hydrogen sulphide is a gas most commonly associated with the smell of stink bombs, sewage and rotten eggs, but researchers have now identified a role for this gas in regulating blood pressure.
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