science newsletter: Science News SciGuru.com

Δευτέρα 19 Νοεμβρίου 2012

Science News SciGuru.com

Vision stimulates courtship calls in the grey tree frog
Method for assessing hand bone density may prevent hip fractures
Portrait of a super-Jupiter

Vision stimulates courtship calls in the grey tree frog

Posted: 19 Nov 2012 06:58 AM PST

Male tree frogs like to 'see what they're getting' when they select females for mating, according to a new study by Dr. Michael Reichert from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in the US. His work, which is one of the first to test the importance of vision on male mating behaviors in a nocturnal anuran (frog or toad), is published online in Springer's journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology.

Method for assessing hand bone density may prevent hip fractures

Posted: 19 Nov 2012 06:44 AM PST

A new study from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden shows, that a technique for measuring bone density called digital X-ray radiogrammetry (or DXR) used on standard hand radiographs can help to identify patients with a higher risk of hip fracture. The researchers believe that DXR, which is fully comparable with other, more costly methods, can be used preventively to identify people in the risk zone for osteoporosis - a disease estimated to effect some 200 million women worldwide.

Portrait of a super-Jupiter

Posted: 19 Nov 2012 06:40 AM PST

Capturing an image of extrasolar planets is difficult: the celestial bodies are very far away, relatively small and drown in the light of their parent star. Despite this, a team of researchers, including several from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, has successfully captured an image of a “super-Jupiter” which orbits the star Kappa Andromedae. The gas giant has roughly 13 times the mass of Jupiter, while the parent star has 2.5 times the mass of the Sun.