Researchers have shown that popular free smartphone apps spend up to 75 percent of their energy tracking the user's geographical location, sending information about the user to advertisers and downloading ads. Free Apps Drain Smartphone Energy On 'Advertising Modules' "It turns out the free apps aren't really free because they contain the hidden cost of reduced battery life," said Y. Charlie Hu, a Purdue University professor of electrical and computer engineering. Because smartphone batteries must be small and lightweight, power consumption is a major issue, the researcher said. He has led work to create a new tool called eprof -- for energy profiler -- to analyze how much energy a smartphone app consumes. New findings show that 65 percent to 75 percent of the energy used to run free apps is spent for advertising-related functions. "We performed an in-depth case study, the first of its kind, of six popular smartphone apps, including Angry Birds, Fa

Old Fish Makes New Splash  Coelacanth Find Rewrites History of the Ancient Fish ScienceDaily (May 2, 2012) — Coelacanths, an ancient group of fishes that were once thought to exist only in fossils, made headlines in 1938 when one of their modern relatives was pulled alive from the ocean. Now coelacanths are making another splash -- and University of Alberta researchers are responsible for the discovery. Lead U of A researcher Andrew Wendruff identified coelacanth fossils that he says are so dramatically different from previous finds, they shatter the theory that coelacanth evolution was stagnant in that their body shape and lifestyle changed little since the origin of the group. Wendruff says his one-metre-long, fork-tailed coelacanth was one of an "offshoot" lineage that lived 240 million years ago. It falls between the earliest coelacanth fossils dating back 410 million years and the latest fossils dated about 75 million years ago, near the end of the age of dinosa

Environment and Urbanization Environment and Urbanization aims to provide an effective means for the exchange of research findings, ideas and information in the fields of human settlements and environment among researchers, activists and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in low- and middle-income nations and between these and researchers, international agency staff, students and teachers in high-income nations. E&U is one of the world`s most highly ranked environmental and urban studies journals. Impact Factor: 2.224 Ranked: 10 out of 78 in Environmental Studies and 2 out of 36 in Urban Studies