Tech

WASHINGTON, May 29, 2014—A new twist on 3-D imaging technology could one day enable your self-driving car to spot a child in the street half a block away, let you answer your Smartphone from across the room with a wave of your hand, or play "virtual tennis" on your driveway.

Indiana University researchers put male rats to the test to determine the role amphetamines play when used in conjunction with exercise.

When people or animals exercise in the heat, exhaustion is a safety gauge telling the body it is time to stop. Exhaustion occurs when the body's core temperature reaches a potentially dangerous point. The use of amphetamines is banned in many sports because they increase time to exhaustion.

A Harvard-led team is the first to demonstrate the ability to use low-power light to trigger stem cells inside the body to regenerate tissue, an advance they reported in Science Translational Medicine. The research, led by Wyss Institute Core Faculty member David Mooney, Ph.D., lays the foundation for a host of clinical applications in restorative dentistry and regenerative medicine more broadly, such as wound healing, bone regeneration, and more.

Making a tabletop particle accelerator just got easier. A new study shows that certain requirements for the lasers used in an emerging type of small-area particle accelerator can be significantly relaxed. Researchers hope the finding could bring about a new era of accelerators that would need just a few meters to bring particles to great speeds, rather than the many kilometers required of traditional accelerators. The research, from scientists at the U.S.

Cats eat more during the winter and owners should give their pet more food during this time, University of Liverpool research has found.

Researchers from the University's School of Veterinary Science, in collaboration with colleagues at the Royal Canin Research Centre in France, spent four years monitoring how much cats chose to eat, and found that food intake increased in colder months and decreased during the summer.

In a recent study involving researchers from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich, the desorption of oxygen molecules from a silver surface was successfully visualized for the first time. The effects account for the shortcomings of conventional models of desorption.

In a recent study involving LMU researchers, the desorption of oxygen molecules from a silver surface was successfully visualized for the first time. The effects account for the shortcomings of conventional models of desorption.

Lung cancer is a serious condition. Once patients are diagnosed with it, chemotherapy is often their only hope. But nobody can accurately predict whether or not this treatment will help. To start with, not all patients respond to a course of chemotherapy in exactly the same way.

WASHINGTON D.C., May 27, 2014 -- It took every inch of the Large Hadron Collider's 17-mile length to accelerate particles to energies high enough to discover the Higgs boson. Now, imagine an accelerator that could do the same thing in, say, the length of a football field. Or less.

Faleh Tamimi, a professor in McGill's School of Dentistry, is the leader of a research team that has just discovered that melatonin supplements make bones stronger in elderly rats and therefore, potentially, in elderly humans too. "Old rats are tedious to work with because they get sick a lot and that means they also cost a lot more. But if you're interested in diseases like osteoporosis, they're an essential part of the process."

Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones – sleep and bone regulation

Michael Lewis's bestselling book "Flash Boys" describes how some brokers, engaging in high frequency trading, exploit fast telecommunications to gain fraction-of-a-second advantage in the buying and selling of stocks. But you don't need to have billions of dollars riding on this-second securities transactions to appreciate the importance of fast signal processing. From internet to video streaming, we want things fast.

The bright yellow fields of oilseed rape are a familiar sight at this time of year, but for scientists what lies beneath is just as exciting.

Researchers at the Institute of Food Research are looking at how to turn straw from oilseed rape into biofuel. Preliminary findings are pointing at ways the process could be made more efficient, as well as how the straw itself could be improved.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — A new study of bats reveals a capability within their wondrous wings that may help them fine-tune their flight.

Bats employ a network of nearly hair-thin muscles embedded in the membrane of their inherently floppy wing skin to adjust the wings' stiffness and curvature while they fly, Brown University researchers report. Birds and insects have stiff wings, but the new evidence suggests bats have evolved this muscular means of preserving or adjusting wing shape.

Researchers have been taking tips from nature to build the next generation of flying robots.

Based on the mechanisms adopted by birds, bats, insects and snakes, 14 distinguished research teams have developed solutions to some of the common problems that drones could be faced with when navigating through an urban environment and performing novel tasks for the benefit of society.

Tecnalia has collaborated in a study for the European Parliament's Science and Technology Options Assessment Panel (STOA) on the future use of methanol, produced from carbon dioxide, in motorised transport. STOA is the panel that advises MEPs in the sphere of Science and Technology.

The study analysed the barriers –technological, environmental and economic– to producing methanol using carbon dioxide as well as the options that would allow possible uses in automobile transport in the medium and long term.

Duke University researchers have found an antibody that simultaneously blocks the sensations of pain and itching in studies with mice.

The new antibody works by targeting the voltage-sensitive sodium channels in the cell membrane of neurons. The results appear online on May 22 in Cell.