News Articles

The human fingertip is a finely tuned sensory machine, and even slight touches convey a great deal of information about our physical environment. It turns out, some fish use their pectoral fins in pretty much the same way. And do so through a surprisingly similar biological mechanism to mammals -- humans included.
In a study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B on Feb. 10, 2016 University of Chicago scientists have shown for the first time that pectoral fins in at least one species of fish possess neurons and cells that are exquisitely sensitive to touch. The discovery not only sheds light on the evolutionary biology of touch, it might also someday inspire new advances in the design of underwater robotics.

Dramatic videos created by environmental activists shows tap water being set on fire. In some cases, they were clear hoaxes, in others it turned out to be methane unrelated to drilling. Yet regardless, the belief is that natural gas fracturing (fracking), or conventional extraction, can reach drinking water. Scientists disagree, though conceding that anything can happen in the right circumstances, without it being indicative of the process.

Is a scientist someone who does science? It depends on who you ask, according to a presentation at the AAAS meeting in Washington, D.C.  A century ago, an occupation based on intelligence was regarded as a blue-collar endeavor. Sherlock Holmes was better than the police because he was an amateur detective, self-educated in science. Today, a large number of scientists, and certainly much of the public, thinks you are only a scientist if you are government funded.

A Northwestern University research team has taken CSI to a whole new level: employing sophisticated scientific tools to investigate details of the materials and methods used by Roman-Egyptian artists to paint lifelike mummy portraits more than 2,000 years ago. These visages of the dead are considered to be antecedents of Western portraiture.
Marc Walton and his interdisciplinary team have uncovered telling clues about the paintings' underlying surface shapes and colors. The new details, when coupled together, provide the researchers with very strong evidence as to how many of the 15 mummy portraits and panel paintings were made.

Technological advances may be ushering in a new era of understanding in the search for fundamental physical particles - including dark matter - said Professor Alex Murphy of the University of Edinburgh's School of Physics and Astronomy at the AAAS meeting in Washington, D.C.
Deep space observations together with experiments far underground are hunting for dark matter - an elusive material which, together with dark energy, is thought to account for about 94 percent of the universe.  You can read all about dark matter and dark energy here.

HOUSTON - (Feb. 13, 2016) - A Rice University researcher will discuss images that may show the formation of a planet -- or a planetary system -- around a distant binary star at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C., today.
Andrea Isella, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy, will present images of the binary system known as HD 142527, captured by the new Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) radio telescope in Chile.
Isella said the binary system has long been known to harbor a planet-forming corona of dust and gas, but ALMA images are providing more detail than ever and allowing for better analysis of the system's contents and mechanics.

Strides are being made with wildlife conservation that invites recreational wildlife enthusiasts to report online observations that help with modeling and migration. Work is also being done to use crowdsourcing to help discover new materials for more environmentally friendly fuels, batteries, etc.

HOUSTON -- (Feb. 13, 2016) -- Rice University computer scientist Moshe Vardi expects that within 30 years, machines will be capable of doing almost any job that a human can. In anticipation, he is asking his colleagues to consider the societal implications. Can the global economy adapt to greater than 50 percent unemployment? Will those out of work be content to live a life of leisure?
"We are approaching a time when machines will be able to outperform humans at almost any task," Vardi said. "I believe that society needs to confront this question before it is upon us: If machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do?"

Scientists have inventoried and categorized all of Earth's rare mineral species described to date, each sampled from five or fewer sites around the globe. Individually, several of the species have a known supply worldwide smaller than a sugar cube.
These 2,550 minerals are far more rare than pricey diamonds and gems usually presented as tokens of love. But while their rarity would logically make them the most precious of minerals, many would not work in a Valentine's Day ring setting. Several are prone to melt, evaporate or dehydrate. And a few, vampire-like, gradually decompose on exposure to sunlight.

The rapid pace of artificial intelligence (AI) has raised fears about whether robots could act unethically or soon choose to harm humans. Some are calling for bans on robotics research; others are calling for more research to understand how AI might be constrained. But how can robots learn ethical behavior if there is no "user manual" for being human?
Researchers Mark Riedl and Brent Harrison from the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology believe the answer lies in "Quixote" -- to be unveiled at the AAAI-16 Conference in Phoenix, Ariz. (Feb. 12 - 17, 2016). Quixote teaches "value alignment" to robots by training them to read stories, learn acceptable sequences of events and understand successful ways to behave in human societies.

ANN ARBOR--On Charles Darwin's 207th birthday, a new study of evolution in a diverse group of wild tomatoes is shedding light on the importance of genetic variation in plants.
The work, reported today in the journal PLoS Biology, uses genome-wide sequencing to reveal details about the evolutionary mechanisms that drove genetic divergence in 13 species of wild tomatoes that share a recent common ancestor.
First author of the study is University of Michigan postdoctoral fellow James Pease, who conducted the work for his doctoral dissertation at Indiana University. The in-depth genetic analysis was led by IU's Leonie Moyle.

Lincoln, Neb., Feb. 12, 2016 -- Amid the season known for transforming Nebraska into an outdoor ice rink, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln-led research team has predicted a new molecular form of the slippery stuff that even Mother Nature has never borne.
The proposed ice, which the researchers describe in a Feb. 12, 2016 study in the journal Science Advances, would be about 25 percent less dense than a record-low form synthesized by a European team in 2014.
If the ice can be synthesized, it would become the 18th known crystalline form of water -- and the first discovered in the United States since before World War II.