Tech

Berkeley — When engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, outfitted a six-legged robotic bug with wings in an effort to improve its mobility, they unexpectedly shed some light on the evolution of flight.

A six-legged, 25 gram robot has been fitted with flapping wings in order to gain an insight into the evolution of early birds and insects.

Published today, 18 October, in IOP Publishing's journal Bioinspiration & Biomimetics, the study showed that although flapping wings significantly increased the speed of running robots, the origin of wings may lie in animals that dwelled in trees rather than on the ground.

Electric and hybrid vehicles will be conquering the cities: cars, bicycles, buses and trains. This is why new ideas are in demand for individual and public transportation. In "Fraunhofer's System Research for Electromobility" researchers are coming up with solutions for tomorrow's mobility.

PITTSBURGH—OmniTouch, a wearable projection system developed by researchers at Microsoft Research and Carnegie Mellon University, enables users to turn pads of paper, walls or even their own hands, arms and legs into graphical, interactive surfaces.

It is becoming more and more common to install solar panels on roofs in order to obtain green electricity, but not all roofs are equally suitable. Scientists from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, have launched a tool that uses the actual conditions to determine the maximum possible magnitude of solar incidence - in a whole town, a neighbourhood, or a particular roof. The scientists have surveyed Gothenburg in a pilot project.

Scientists at Northwestern University have developed a new nanomaterial that can "steer" electrical currents. The development could lead to a computer that can simply reconfigure its internal wiring and become an entirely different device, based on changing needs.

BOSTON -- Children dependent on electrically powered medical devices for life support and maintenance are vulnerable to an unexpected loss of power – and their parents are ill-prepared to deal with it, according to an abstract presented Sunday, Oct. 16, at the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) National Conference and Exhibition in Boston.

A meat-eating dinosaur that terrorized its plant-eating neighbours in South America was a lot deadlier than first thought, a University of Alberta researcher has found.

Carnotaurus was a seven-metre-long predator with a huge tail muscle that U of A paleontology graduate student Scott Persons says made it one of the fastest running hunters of its time.

MAYWOOD, Il. -- MRI scanning could become a powerful new tool for assessing how well cholesterol drugs are working, according to Loyola University Health System cardiologist Binh An P. Phan, MD.

Phan is co-author of an MRI study of patients who had recently begun taking cholesterol medications. The study found that intensive treatment with cholesterol drugs significantly reduced the amount of cholesterol in artery-clogging plaque. The study is published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology: Cardiovascular Imaging.

NAIROBI, KENYA -- On a continent battered by weather extremes, famine and record food prices, new research released today from the World Agroforestry Centre documents an exciting new trend in which hundreds of thousands of poor farmers in Southern Africa are now significantly boosting yields and incomes simply by using fast growing trees and shrubs to naturally fertilize their fields.

Amsterdam, The Netherlands, October 13, 2011 –Studies have estimated that converting manure from the 95 million animal units in the United States would produce renewable energy equal to 8 billion gallons of gasoline, or 1% of the total energy consumption in the nation. Because more and more farmers and communities are interested in generating renewable energy from farm waste, there is a growing need for information on the economic feasibility and sustainability of such programs.

A new University of Washington study found college students – only weeks away from final exams and in the library – tend to pare use of electronics. It's their way to manage technology that permeates their lives.

PULLMAN, Wash. – Traditional thought has held that disease had to penetrate a plant to initiate resistance; however, two Washington State University scientists have established that a barley plant recognizes an invader and begins to marshal its defenses within five minutes of an attack.

Providence, RI---In his 1989 book "The Emperor's New Mind", RogerPenrose commented on the limitations on human knowledge with astriking example: He conjectured that we would most likely never knowwhether a string of 10 consecutive 7s appears in the digital expansionof the number pi. Just 8 years later, Yasumasa Kanada used a computerto find exactly that string, starting at the 22869046249th digit ofpi. Penrose was certainly not alone in his inability to foresee thetremendous power that computers would soon possess.

Seven papers published in the current issue of Technology and Innovation, Proceedings of the National Academy of Inventors ™ report on efforts by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to ensure continued safe and secure storage and disposition of 50 years worth of spent nuclear fuel, surplus nuclear materials, and high-level wastes at DOE facilities.