News Articles

The uncanny valley has a new hill to climb - our ability to consider it human-like depends on its role in our lives, say a group of scholars.
 And roles are also important in positive feelings. Designers and engineers assign robots specific roles, such as servant, caregiver, assistant or playmate and the scholars analyzing  60 interactions between college students and Nao, a social robot developed by Aldebaran Robotics, a French company specializing in humanoid robots, found that people expressed more positive feelings toward a robot that would take care of them than toward a robot that needed care.

Standard atomic weights for chemical elements are not quite as constant as you might think - along with the speed of light and the attraction of gravity there are some exceptions. Hold on to your Newtonian hat and prepare for the possibility of elementary nuances.

Anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa are psychological disorders characterized by extreme eating behavior and distorted body image – both have few proven effective treatments.A new paper suggests that the altered function of neural circuitry contributes to restricted eating in anorexia and overeating in bulimia. The study used functional MRI to test this neurocircuitry by measuring the brain response to sweet tastes in 28 women who had recovered from either anorexia or bulimia.Relative to a cohort of 14 women who had never suffered from either disorder, those recovered from anorexia had significantly diminished, and those recovered from bulimia, significantly elevated responses to the taste of sucrose in the right anterior insula.

A new drought-protecting chemical shows potential for crop protection during periods of dry weather.A research team led by Sean Cutler, a plant cell biologist at the University of California, Riverside, has found a new drought-protecting chemical that shows high potential for becoming a powerful tool for crop protection in the new world of extreme weather.Named “quinabactin” by the researchers, the chemical mimics a naturally occurring stress hormone in plants that helps the plants cope with drought conditions.

Birds in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta of western Alaska have been discovered having low-pathogenic avian influenza viruses with Eurasian genes, supporting the hypothesis that the area is a potential point of entry for foreign animal diseases such as the more highly pathogenic H5N1 strain, according to U.S. Geological Survey scientists.

The 400-mile IndyCar race July 7th at Pocono Raceway will be the first open-wheeled event at the 2.5-mile, triangular-shaped track since 1989.Pocono Raceway's triangular design, known as "The Tricky Triangle," makes it truly unique. Pocono is the America's only professional race circuit with three turns, three different radii and three variant degrees of banking.

The Solar Impulse airplane, brain-child airplane of Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg (who co-piloted the entire journey) that can fly day and night without fuel or polluting emissions, has ended its cross-country journey in New York City. Solar Impulse is an unique adventure that seeks to put some emotion into solar power and also a flying laboratory to find innovative technological solutions for today’s solar challenges.

Barnacles are a major problem for both small boats and large ships because they accumulate on the hulls and can reduce the fuel economy of a vessel by up to 40 per cent. That means CO2 emissions rise accordingly.

'Organic' milk has a lower concentration of elements like zinc, iodine and selenium than milk produced by conventional farming methods, due to the absence of mineral substances in the diets of the cows reared. According to researchers at the University of Santiago de Compostela, animals on organic farms should have their diets supplemented with iodine because it is a very important element for children and pregnant women.

Don't be bold. Risky behavior can lead to premature death.Female mice with the highest life expectancy are less active and less explorative, they also eat less than females with a lower life expectancy. Behavioral biologists from the University of Zurich found a correlation between longevity and personality for female house mice, and a minimum amount of boldness is necessary for them to survive. Anna Lindholm and her doctoral student Yannick Auclair investigated whether this also applies to animals by studying the behavior of 82 house mice. 

About 5 million children worldwide have been born by IVF since 1978, and 1.4 percent of total births in the U.S. annually and as many as 4.4 percent in western Europe result from the procedure, according to government and industry figures. Across all types of IVF procedures, compared with spontaneous pregnancies, a study found no increase in the risk of autism, but in one type there was.

The transcription factor Nanog plays a critical role in the self-renewal of embryonic stem cells and is expressed in a manner similar to other pluripotency markers, according to a new paper This finding contradicts the field's presumptions about this important gene and its role in the differentiation of embryonic stem cells.