News Articles

Paleontologist Sankar Chatterjee of Texas Tech University, aeronautical engineer Rick Lind of the University of Florida, and their students Andy Gedeon and Brian Roberts have reached back in time 115 million years to one of the most successful flying creatures in Earth’s history, the pterodactyl, to conjure a robotic spy plane with next-generation capabilities.
Mimicking the physical and biological characteristics of the Early Cretaceous Brazilian pterosaur Tapejara wellnhoferi -- skin, blood vessels, muscles, tendons, nerves, cranial plate, skeletal structure, and more -- the scientists are working to develop a Pterodrone -- an unmanned aerial vehicle that not only flies but also walks and sails just like the original.

In old movies we were going to improve society by making everything think like a computer. Now the goal is to make computers think like brains. Researchers at Missouri University of Science and Technology say they can make power network management more efficient by literally tapping brain cells grown on networks of electrodes.
The Missouri S&T group, working with researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology, plans to use the brain power to develop a new method for tracking and managing the constantly changing levels of power supply and demand.

Researchers are looking to increase security at border controls by developing a computer system that can detect guilt. Obviously a successful prototype could be used in multiple other applications, like police interrogations and interview scenarios. “Who knows - it could even be used to enhance our real-time computer gaming experiences,” says Dr Hassan Ugail, Head of Visual Computing Research at the University of Bradford’s School of Informatics.
Ugail is part of a team working on a £500,000 project to develop technologies that would assist the border control agencies in identifying people trying to smuggle contraband goods or narcotics through customs.

Scientists at the University of Liverpool have tested an ‘invisibility cloak’ that could reduce the risk of large water waves overtopping coastal defences.
Mathematicians at Liverpool, working with physicists at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and Aix-Marseille Universite have found that coastal defences could be made ‘invisible' when water is guided through a special structure made of metamaterials.
Metamaterial was first invented by Sir John Pendry at Imperial College London where scientists discovered that this unique structure could bend electromagnetic radiation – such as visible light, radar or microwaves – around a spherical space, making an object within this region appear invisible.

Researchers at the University of Toronto have shown that the EBNA1 protein of Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) disrupts structures in the nucleus of nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) cells, thereby interfering with cellular processes that normally prevent cancer development. The study, published October 3rd in the open-access journal PLoS Pathogens, describes a novel mechanism by which viral proteins contribute to carcinogenesis.
EBV is a common herpesvirus whose latent infection is strongly associated with several types of cancer including NPC, a tumor that is endemic in several parts of the world. With NPC only a few EBV proteins are expressed, including EBNA1.

It's baseball playoff time and you know what that means; not just hot dogs and beer but also smelly men who refuse to change their socks lest they spoil their good luck. After all, they got this far with smelly socks, right? And
New research published in Science seeks to explain why people sometimes find and impose order in a chaotic world through superstition, rituals and conspiratorial explanations. The research finds that a quest for structure or understanding leads people to trick themselves into seeing and believing connections that simply don't exist.

A new study has concluded that musicians have IQ scores than non-musicians, supporting other recent research that intensive musical training is associated with an elevated IQ score.
Vanderbilt University psychologists Crystal Gibson, Bradley Folley and Sohee Park have found that professionally trained musicians more effectively use a creative technique called divergent thinking, and also use both the left and the right sides of their frontal cortex more heavily than the average person.
One possible explanation the researchers offer for the musicians' elevated use of both brain hemispheres is that many musicians must be able to use both hands independently to play their instruments.

There was an idea first proposed in 1916 — that plants with rapid reproductive cycles evolve faster - and a team of Yale scientists writing in Science say they have confirmed it using 2008 computing power.
Long involved with the Tree of Life Web Project, which is attempting to reconstruct the “tree” representing the genealogical relationships of all species on Earth, Michael Donoghue, the G. Evelyn Hutchinson Professor of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and Curator of Botany at Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History, has spearheaded the study of flowering plant evolution. In animals, the variation in rate of molecular evolution has been ascribed to differences in generation time, metabolic rate, DNA repair, and body size; in plants, the differences have been more difficult to determine.

Bacteria are everywhere and can survive in almost anything. Finding out exactly how bacteria respond and adapt to stresses and dangers will further our understanding of the basic survival mechanisms of some of the most resilient, hardy organisms on Earth.
Toward that goal, a bacteria cell's 'crisis command center' has been observed for the first time swinging into action to protect the cell from external stress and danger, according to new research out today.
It's like Team America: World Police, except there are no animatronic puppets or Alec Baldwin impressions.
The crisis command center in certain bacteria cells is a large molecule, dubbed a 'stressosome' by the scientists behind today's research.

For several decades, scientists have thought that the Solar System formed as a result of a shock wave from an exploding star — a supernova — that triggered the collapse of a dense, dusty gas cloud that contracted to form the Sun and the planets.
Models of this formation process have only worked under the simplifying assumption that the temperatures during the violent events remained constant but astrophysicists at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (DTM) say their new model says that a supernova could indeed have triggered the Solar System’s formation under the more likely conditions of rapid heating and cooling.

As the world looks for more energy, the oil industry will need more refined tools for discoveries in places where searches have never before taken place, geologists say. One such tool is a new sediment curve (which shows where sediment-on-the-move is deposited), derived from sediments of the Paleozoic Era 542 to 251 million years ago, scientists report in this week's Science. The sediment curve covers the entire Paleozoic Era.
"The sediment curve is of interest to industry, and also to scientists in academia," said Bilal Haq, lead author of the paper and a marine geologist at the National Science Foundation (NSF), "as the rise and fall of sea-level form the basis for intepretations of Earth history based on stratigraphy."

Belief in God encourages people to be helpful, honest and generous, but only under certain psychological conditions, according to University of British Columbia researchers who analyzed the past three decades of social science research.
Religious people are more likely than the non-religious to engage in prosocial behavior – acts that benefit others at a personal cost – when it enhances the individual's reputation or when religious thoughts are freshly activated in the person's mind, say UBC social psychologists Ara Norenzayan and Azim Shariff