Futurity.org » Iowa State University

Are videogames good or bad … or both?

Mike Ferlazzo-Iowa State — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 14:57:20 +0000

IOWA STATE (US) —Videogames are powerful learning tools but the lessons—positive or negative—depend on the game, according to a new study.

To parents who just purchased new videogames for their kids this holiday season, associate professor of psychology at Iowa State University Douglas Gentile says that it’s not simply a “black and white” issue when it comes to how video games affect the brain.

Two new planets survive red-giant blast

Mike Krapfl-Iowa State — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 14:30:13 +0000

IOWA STATE (US) — Astronomers have discovered two Earth-sized planets that survived getting caught in the red-giant expansion of their host star.

Steve Kawaler, professor of physics and astronomy at Iowa State University and a leader of the Kepler Asteroseismic Investigation, helped the research team study data from the Kepler space telescope to confirm that tiny variations of light from a star were actually caused by two planets of that star.

How to build a better wind farm

Mike Krapfl-Iowa State — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 16:23:19 +0000

IOWA STATE (US) — A turbine only ten inches high is helping researchers understand how hills, valleys, and tower placement can affect the productivity of onshore wind farms.

The tower is a perfect 1:320 scale of the 80-meter wind turbines in Iowa, the nation’s second-ranked state for installed wind power capacity. While the wind industry has data about offshore turbine performance over flat water—especially from European studies—there is little data about the effects of uneven ground on wind turbines.

Like humans, chimps share to be social

Mike Ferlazzo-Iowa State — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 15:39:35 +0000

IOWA STATE (US) — Humans aren’t the only ones who recognize the benefits of sharing. New research finds male chimps share plants and hunting tools with females, perhaps as a strategy for future mating.

A new study of chimps at the Fongoli research site in Senegal, has documented a frequency of sharing previously unreported for chimpanzees—not only do they transfer meat and wild plant foods, they also share tools, honey, and soil.

Free school lunches linked to lower obesity

Mike Ferlazzo-Iowa State — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 19:57:56 +0000

IOWA STATE (US) — Free and reduced-price meals provided through the federally funded National School Lunch Program improve the health of more than 31 million children living in low-income households.

Researchers analyzed data from nearly 2,700 NSLP children (ages 6-17) taken from the 2001-04 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. The study finds that the lunch program reduces the prevalence of food insecurity—a situation in which an individual cannot access enough food to sustain active, healthy living—by 3.8 percent, poor general health by 29 percent, and the rate of obesity by at least 17 percent in its participants.

Gamma rays from pulsar defy explanation

Katherine Gombay-McGill — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 14:34:22 +0000

MCGILL U. (CAN) — Astrophysicists have detected pulsed gamma-ray emission from the Crab pulsar at energies far beyond what current theoretical models of pulsars can explain.

With energies exceeding 100 billion electron-volts (100 GeV), the surprising gamma-ray pulses were detected by the VERITAS (Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System) telescope array at the Whipple Observatory in Arizona and reported by an international team of scientists in a paper in Science.

Cheap sugars could be biofuel bargain

Mike Krapfl-Iowa State — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 13:49:54 +0000

IOWA STATE (US) — Engineers have developed a way to make low-cost sugars from biomass, a discovery that has the potential to reduce the cost of producing biofuels.

“It looks like something you could pour on your pancakes,” says Robert Brown, an engineering professor at Iowa State University, about a vial of dark, sweet-smelling liquid. “In many respects, it is similar to molasses.”

Biomass link to plant diversity questioned

Dan Kuester-Iowa State — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 15:14:16 +0000

IOWA STATE (US) — New research calls into question a decades-old theory about the relationship between how much biomass plant species produce and how many species can co-exist.

A 1970s study claimed that as plant productivity increased, so did plant richness (the number of plant species) but only to a point, with maximum species richness occurring at the point of intermediate productivity. After that, the number of species was thought to decline, creating a hump curve when plotted on a graph.

To ID the perp, one photo at a time

Mike Ferlazzo-Iowa State — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 14:21:36 +0000

IOWA STATE U. (US) — Sequential photo lineups—those in which crime witnesses view one suspect photograph at a time—produce fewer mistaken identifications than simultaneous photo lineups.

Those are the findings of a report issued this week by both the American Judicature Society (AJS) and the Police Foundation.

Super food: Shoppers will pay 25% more

Dan Kuester-Iowa State — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 16:16:18 +0000

IOWA STATE (US) — Consumers want access to food that has been genetically modified to be healthier and are willing to pay significantly more for it, according to a new study.

“What we found was when genes for enhancing the amount of antioxidants and vitamin C in fresh produce were transferred by intragenic methods, consumers are willing to pay 25 percent more than for the plain product (with no enhancements). That is a sizable increase,” says Wallace Huffman, distinguished professor of economics at Iowa State University.