NPG

Economic recovery has not yet made its presence felt at public universities in California. (Indeed, at least in the California State University system, all things budgetary are going to be significantly worse in the next academic year, not better.) This means it's not a great time for purveyors of electronic journals to present academic libraries in public university systems with big increases in subscription prices. Yet Nature Publishing Group has, apparently, done just that by some 400%. And, as noted by Christina Pikas and Dorothea Salo and Jennifer Howard in The Chronicle of Higher…
tags: kinematics, kinetics, running,The Barefoot Professor, exercise physiology, barefoot running, NPG, peer-reviewed research, NATURE, 10.1038/nature08723, streaming video Harvard professor Daniel Lieberman ditched his trainers and started running barefoot. His research shows that barefoot runners, who tend to land on their fore-foot, generate less impact shock than runners in sports shoes who land heel first. This makes barefoot running comfortable and could minimize running-related injuries. This video is interesting to me because I was a cross-country runner and later, a long-distance…
tags: astronomy, cosmology, black obelisks, Dwarf Galaxy Dance, formation of dwarf galaxies, cold dark matter model, NPG, peer-reviewed research, NATURE, 10.1038/nature08640, streaming video This beautiful animation shows how exploding stars are a key force in shaping dwarf galaxies. Fabio Governato and colleagues present computer simulations that appear to have solved a longstanding problem in cosmology -- namely, how the standard cold dark matter model of galaxy formation can give rise to the dwarf galaxies we see around us. DOI: 10.1038/nature08640.