Bridges that "dance" during earthquakes could be the safest and least expensive to build, retrofit and repair, according to earthquake engineers at the University at Buffalo and MCEER.

The researchers recently developed and successfully tested the first seismic design methodology for bridge towers that respond to ground motions by literally jumping a few inches off the ground.

The new methodology allows steel truss towers that support bridge decks to be built or retrofitted at far less expense than conventional approaches, where each leg of a bridge tower is strongly anchored to its footing.

The research is funded by the U.S. Federal Highway Administration.

"HD 149026b is simply the most exotic, bizarre planet. It’s pretty small, really dense, and now we find that it’s extremely hot."

Using Spitzer, NASA’s infrared space telescope,Joseph Harrington of the University of Central Florida. and his team observed the tiny planet disappear behind its star and reappear. Although the planet cannot be seen separately from the star, the dimming of the light that reached Spitzer told the scientists how much light the hot planet emits. From this they deduced the temperature on the side of the planet facing its star. The team’s findings were published online in Nature today.

Scientists examining documents dating back 3,500 years say they have found proof that the origins of modern medicine lie in ancient Egypt and not with Hippocrates and the Greeks.

The research team from the KNH Centre for Biomedical Egyptology at The University of Manchester discovered the evidence in medical papyri written in 1,500BC – 1,000 years before Hippocrates was born.

ESA’s X-ray observatory XMM-Newton has revealed a new class of exploding stars – where the X-ray emission ‘lives fast and dies young’.

The identification of this particular class of explosions gives astronomers a valuable new constraint to help them model and understand stellar explosions.

The Fumanya site, in the Bergueda region of central Catalonia, is so delicate that experts cannot get physically close enough to the tracks to examine them.

In the years since the tracks were discovered they have been exposed to the elements, and as a result are severely weathered and eroding at a rapid rate.

To make things even more difficult, the tracks are imprinted into near-vertical rock faces.

Palaeontologists feared the tracks could be lost forever - but a permanent and detailed record has now been created using cutting-edge equipment.

Using a high-tech laser scanning system called RIEGL, researchers from The School of Earth, Atmospheric and Environmental have produced an interactive 3D model of a quarry face covered in thousands of tracks made by the late Cretaceous din

A research team led by Carole Thivierge, from Université Laval’s Institute of Nutraceutics and Functional Foods, shows that omega-3 fatty acids from fish oil have a positive effect on the metabolism of muscle proteins. This finding, published in a recent edition of the Journal of Physiology, could have significant implications in the fields of animal farming as well as human health.