Latest Lee Rannals Stories

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Not only does how often you have sex help modify your level of happiness, but so does knowing how often other people have sexual encounters. A study published in Social Indicators Research by Tim Wadsworth, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder, says that people are generally happier when they believe they are having more sex than their peers. "There's an overall increase in sense of well-being...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Researchers say they have found a way to turn some of the fantasies seen in the movie Inception into a reality. Scientists say they discovered a potential way to decode dreams, enabling them to predict the content of the visual imagery being experienced by the dreamer based on neural activity recorded during sleep. The team created decoding computer programs based on brain activity measured while study participants were wide awake...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Harry Potter had one, and maybe one day so will you, if the new invisibility cloak method described in the New Journal of Physics comes to fruition. US researchers have developed a new cloak that is just micrometers thick and is able to hide three-dimensional objects from microwaves in their natural environment, in all directions from all the observers' positions. Previously, scientists have developed invisibility cloaks that...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Dragon completed another successful resupply mission to the International Space Station (ISS) on Tuesday. SpaceX's resupply spacecraft took off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on March 1 atop the Falcon 9 rocket. A few hours into flight SpaceX announced its Dragon capsule was having difficulty with its thruster pods, causing Dragon to delay its arrival to the orbiting lab. Two days later, Dragon was captured with...

[ Watch the Video: Giant Squid All One Big Happy Family ] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online An international team of researchers say they have discovered that the giant squid's DNA stretches across the globe, meaning the ocean beasts intermingle and mate throughout the world. The team wrote in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B that no matter where the elusive animals are found, they are so closely related at the genetic level that they represent a...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Researchers from Lund University in Sweden wrote in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B that the hunting of animals like primates in these rainforests can cause a reduction in the dispersal of seeds. “Hunting has a dramatic effect on the composition and structure of the forest, just as logging does, but without felling any trees,” said Ola Olsson, a professor in Lund’s Department of Biology. The team studied...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Stanford University scientists have begun figuring out what grid-scale battery technologies are doing to the carbon footprint. Researchers have begun developing new batteries and other large-scale storage devices to stockpile surplus clean energy so they can store and deliver it on demand. However, fossil fuel required to build these technologies could negate some of the benefits of installing new solar and wind farms. "We...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Researchers writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences claim they have developed a solar-to-fuel roadmap for crystalline silicon, opening up a potential future system that efficiently harvests sunlight to make storable fuel. A new analysis helps lay out the roadmap for researchers to improve the efficiency of an "artificial leaf," which is a concept of using a silicon solar cell to harness sunlight the way real...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online New research reported in the journal Animal Cognition claims that dogs are able to pick out faces of other dogs on a computer screen, and can group them into a category of their own. Dr. Dominique Autier-Dérian, who led the research along with colleagues, performed the first study to test dogs' ability to discriminate between species and form a "dog" category in spite of the variability within the dog species. Previous research has...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online A 21-page document aiming to help with oil spill plans in the Arctic Ocean is apparently not good enough, according to environmentalists, who add the guidelines are vague and do not define corporate liability over such accidents. A Greenpeace representative told redOrbit there are a number of improvements to the document, due to be approved in May by the Arctic Council, that could be done. "We believe that the risks of being in...