Love them or hate them, cockroaches are notoriously good escape artists and can flee at astonishing speeds. However, this speed can make it difficult to sense the world around them: 'When animals move slowly they rely mostly on their nervous system for accomplishing tasks, but as the animals are pushed to more extreme performances they face potential constraints in their nervous system, for example sensory conduction delays', explains Jean-Michel Mongeau, a researcher from the University of California, Berkeley, USA.
Tech
SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 27, 2013 – Human beings don't come with power sockets, but a growing numbers of us have medical implants that run off electricity. To keep our bionic body parts from powering down, a group of Arizona researchers is developing a safe, noninvasive, and efficient means of wireless power transmission through body tissue. The team presents their findings at the 166th meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, held Dec. 2 – 6 in San Francisco, Calif.
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — The first long-term U.S. field trials of Miscanthus x giganteus, a towering perennial grass used in bioenergy production, reveal that its exceptional yields, though reduced somewhat after five years of growth, are still more than twice those of switchgrass (Panicum virgatum), another perennial grass used as a bioenergy feedstock. Miscanthus grown in Illinois also outperforms even the high yields found in earlier studies of the crop in Europe, the researchers found.
Oil-based compounds are referred to as low-surface tension liquids because they tend to spread on the surface of a researcher's microscope slides or microarrays where the liquids are placed. Additionally, as can be seen from oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico, oil can stick and easily spread out on any surface. Using specially designed oil-repellent surfaces, Kwon and his group demonstrated invisible "virtual walls" which block spreading of low-surface tension liquids at the boundary line with microscopic features already created in the device.
PITTSBURGH—It turns out that the way to keep track of your many passwords to online accounts is the same as how to get to Carnegie Hall — practice, practice, practice. So researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have devised a scheme that enables users to create 100 or more passwords by remembering — and regularly rehearsing — a small number of one-sentence stories.
Some companies could economically convert their operations to wood boilers for heat and power, according to a team of forestry researchers.
The conversion to wood-powered burners would make the most sense for larger commercial and industrial operations in areas that have access to large timber resources and a friendly regulatory environment, said Charles Ray, assistant professor of wood operations, Penn State.
Wood is a renewable resource that could help contribute to the nation's energy needs for an indefinite period, according to Ray.
WASHINGTON D.C. Dec. 3, 2013 -- Through a process known as thermionic conversion, heat energy -- such as light from the sun or heat from burned fossil fuels -- can be converted into electricity with very high efficiency. Because of its promise, researchers have been trying for more than half a century to develop a practical thermionic generator, with little luck. That luck may soon change, thanks to a new design -- dubbed a thermoelectronic generator -- described in AIP Publishing's Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy (JRSE).
A commonly used heart monitor may be a simple tool for predicting the risk of atrial fibrillation, the most frequently diagnosed type of irregular heart rhythm, according to researchers at UC San Francisco.
A biologist in Syracuse University's College of Arts and Sciences has developed a system of techniques for tracking ships and monitoring underwater noise levels in a protected marine mammal habitat. The techniques are the subject of a groundbreaking article in Marine Pollution Bulletin, focusing on the bottlenose dolphin population in Scotland's Moray Firth.
Philadelphia, December 2, 2013 – More than half of older adults in the United States – an estimated 18.7 million people – have experienced bothersome pain in the previous month, impairing their physical function and underscoring the need for public health action on pain. Many of those interviewed by investigators for a study published in the current issue of PAIN® reported pain in multiple areas.
Beaks are a typical hallmark of modern birds and can be found in a huge variety of forms and shapes. However, it is less well known that keratin-covered beaks had already evolved in different groups of dinosaurs during the Cretaceous Period.
Culling vampire bat colonies to stem the transmission of rabies in Latin America does little to slow the spread of the virus and could even have the reverse effect, according to University of Michigan researchers and their colleagues.
Vampire bats transmit rabies virus throughout Latin America, causing thousands of livestock deaths each year, as well as occasional human fatalities. Poison and even explosives have been used since the 1960s in attempts to control vampire bat populations, but those culling efforts have generally failed.
A modeling study by U.S. Forest Service researchers shows that reforesting the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley can significantly reduce runoff from agricultural lands and the amount of sediment entering the area's rivers and streams—and ultimately the Gulf of Mexico. The journal Ecological Engineering recently published the results of the study by Forest Service Southern Research Station scientists Ying Ouyang, Ted Leininger, and Matt Moran.
Johns Hopkins heart researchers are unraveling the mystery of how a modified pacemaker used to treat many patients with heart failure, known as cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT), is able to strengthen the heart muscle while making it beat in a coordinated fashion. In a new study conducted on animal heart cells described in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, the scientists show that CRT changes these cells so they can contract more forcefully. The researchers also identified an enzyme that mimics this effect of CRT without use of the device.
Advances in computer storage have created collections of data so huge that researchers often have trouble uncovering critical patterns in connections among individual items, making it difficult for them to realize fully the power of computing as a research tool.