news 2009

Cambridge, Mass. November 24, 2009 - Applied mathematicians dissected the morphology of the plantain lily (Hosta lancifolia), a characteristic long leaf with a saddle-like arc midsection and closely packed ripples along the edges. The simple cause of the lily's fan-like shape - elastic relaxation resulting from bending during differential growth - was revealed by using an equally simple technique, stretching foam ribbons.

Scientists use the Roadrunner supercomputer to model a fundamental process in physics that could help explain how stars begin to explode into supernovae Los Alamos, New Mexico, November 16, 2009 — Despite decades of research, understanding turbulence, the seemingly random motion of fluid flows, remains one of the major unsolved problems in physics.

BERKELEY — An unusual supernova rediscovered in seven-year-old data may be the first example of a new type of exploding star, possibly from a binary star system where helium flows from one white dwarf onto another and detonates in a thermonuclear explosion. Artist's impression of an AM-CVn star system, where helium flows from one star, a helium white dwarf (upper right), onto another, piling up in an accretion disk around a small, dense primary star.

Office of News and Information Johns Hopkins University 901 South Bond Street, Suite 540 Baltimore, Maryland 21231 Phone: 443-287-9960 Fax: 443-287-9920 May 7, 2009 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE JH Media Contact: Lisa De Nike 443-287-9960, Lde [a] jhu (p) edu Space Telescope Science Institute Contact: Ray Villard 410-338-4514, villard [a] stsci (p) edu Whatever dark energy is, explanations for it have less wiggle room following a Hubble Space Telescope observation that has refined the measurement of the universe's present expansion rate to a precision where the error is smaller than five percent.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet (KI) have constructed a mathematical activity model of the brainŽs frontal and parietal parts, to increase the understanding of the capacity of the working memory and of how the billions of neurons in the brain interact. One of the findings they have made with this "model brain" is a mechanism in the brainŽs neuronal network that restricts the number of items we can normally store in our working memories at any one time to around two to seven.