Journalists are invited this month to a major international meeting devoted to biophysics, a field that seeks to uncover fundamental new understanding of the molecular world and find new treatments and tools for fields across medicine and materials science. The 60th Annual Meeting of the Biophysical Society convenes from Feb. 27- March 2, 2016 at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
System could help prevent robots from overwhelming human teammates with information.
Northwestern University researchers have taken CSI to a new level: employing science to investigate details of the materials and methods used by Roman-Egyptian artists to paint mummy portraits more than 2,000 years ago. Clues about the paintings’ underlying surface shapes and colors provide very strong evidence as to how many of the portraits and panel paintings were made. The researchers concluded that three of the paintings likely came from the same workshop and may have been painted by the same hand.
Rice University professor to discuss planetary formation around binary star system at AAAS meeting.
n a Harrisburg, Pa., Federal courtroom 11 years ago, Brown University biologist Kenneth Miller was the first witness in a historic takedown of Intelligent Design's pretense of scientific relevance. In the context of ongoing culture wars over evolution, climate change, stem cell research and vaccination, Miller will reunite with figures from the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial to review that trial's lessons at the annual meeting of the AAAS in Washington, D.C., Feb. 13, 2016.
New technology could secure credit cards, key cards, and pallets of goods in warehouses.
An artificial intelligence algorithm created by University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) principal research scientist Dr. Rodrigo Teixeira greatly increases accuracy in diagnosing the health of complex mechanical systems.
Transportation engineers from the University of Washington developed an inexpensive system to sense Wi-Fi and Bluetooth signals from bus passengers' mobile devices and collect data to build better transit systems.
Six scientific societies will hold their joint scientific sessions and annual meetings, known as Experimental Biology (EB), from April 2-6, in San Diego.
While Dungeness crab captured headlines, record levels of the neurotoxin domoic acid were found in a range of species, and the toxin showed up in new places.
7th graders conducted classroom experiments using live Trinidadian guppies to test questions related to evolution, increasing both knowledge about and acceptance of evolutionary concepts.
Built environment factors that motivate people to walk and bike vary by income, University of Washington researchers have found. Neighborhood density, accessible destinations and fewer vehicles were associated with more walking and biking in lower-income groups, while neighborhood attractiveness mattered for higher-income groups.
Simple consumer-grade equipment was used to study the combat flight behaviors of carpenter bees right at the researcher’s home.
Variation in egg-coat and sperm expressed genes influences fertility in diverse organisms, from sea stars to mice to humans.
Researchers used NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory, launched and deployed in 1999 by Space Shuttle Columbia.
New research on snakes shows that eating increases the amount of damaging reactive molecules in the body, potentially shaping and constraining life history evolution across animal groups.
Parasitoid wasps manipulate their caterpillar hosts into eating a more wasp-friendly diet.
The Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, an independent, research-driven graduate-level university focused on advanced energy and sustainable technologies, today announced that its researchers have successfully demonstrated that desert sand from the UAE could be used in concentrated solar power (CSP) facilities to store thermal energy up to 1000°C.
New research zeroes in on how the hooded sea slug safely loses limbs.
New smartphone-based system could accelerate development of driverless cars.
Japanese supercomputer model overthrows existing theory of auroral breakup.
Ongoing studies of a massive volcanic field in the Andes mountains show that the rapid uplift which has raised the surface more than six feet in eight years has occurred many times during the past 10,000 years.
A URI undergraduate has investigated six research papers claiming discoveries of human-associated fungi living in seafloor sediments and concluded that they were likely the result of contaminated samples.
Scientists are learning more about how the upper atmosphere and ionosphere affect space satellites as well as communications and navigation here on Earth, thanks to new data from a U.S. Air Force satellite that recently completed a more than seven-year mission.
While some dream of the day that aerial drones deliver their online purchases, scientists are using the technology today to deliver data that was never available before. About 5,000 meters high in the Peruvian Andes, the scientists are mapping glaciers and wetlands in the Cordillera Blanca mountain range with 10-centimeter precision to gauge how climate change will affect the half-million local residents who rely in part on those glaciers for their water supply.
Some of the natural gas harvested by hydraulic fracturing operations may be of biological origin—made by microorganisms inadvertently injected into shale by oil and gas companies during the hydraulic fracturing process, a new study has found.
New research shows a cereal familiar today as birdseed was carried across Eurasia by ancient shepherds and herders laying the foundation, in combination with the new crops they encountered, of 'multi-crop' agriculture and the rise of settled societies. Archaeologists say 'forgotten' millet has a role to play in modern crop diversity and today's food security debate.
Brain cancer is not cellular anarchy, says Pedro Lowenstein and colleagues at the University of Michigan and University of Arizona, but highly organized—self-organized. At ASCB 2015, the researchers report that glioma cells build tumors by self-organizing into streams,10-20 cells wide, that obey a mathematically predicted pattern for autonomous agents flowing together. These streams drag along slower gliomas, may block entry of immune cells, and swirl around a central axis containing glioma stem cells that feed the tumor’s growth.
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD )is the third leading cause of death in the US and cigarette smoking is the leading cause of COPD. Currently there is no cure, current treatments are largely palliative, and new treatment targets are scarce. Now Corrine Kliment and colleagues in Doug Robinson’s lab at Johns Hopkins University have found two new targets for blocking cigarette smoke-induced COPD in a surprising place—amoebas. Kliment presents the work at ASCB 2015.
University of Washington researchers have reconstructed 3-D models of celebrities such as Tom Hanks from large Internet photo collections. The models can deliver speeches that the real actor never performed - one step toward developing fully interactive digital models of people from family or historic photo collections.
A new international report warns that climate change will likely have far-reaching impacts on food security worldwide, especially for the poor and those in tropical regions. The report, issued today at the Paris climate talks, finds that warmer temperatures and altered precipitation patterns can affect food production, transportation, and safety.
Journalists are invited as guests to find great news leads and meet experts at the Society for Risk Analysis Annual Meeting in Arlington, VA, December 6-10, 2015.
Along coastlines from California to Australia, you'll see surfers trying to catch that perfect wave. How they find and ride that wave relies on feel and intuition, developed through skill and experience. Now researchers from the LadHyX Hydrodynamics Laboratory of École Polytechnique in France are trying to quantify this ability, studying the conditions necessary for a surfer to catch a wave. They'll present their findings at APS's DFD 2015 Meeting.
Simply oscillating its fins is all a flounder, a flat fish, needs to do to resuspend sand and quickly disappear beneath it to hide. By discovering the physics at play, researchers in France are hoping to provide a new flounder-inspired solution to a common technological challenge: the resuspension of granular material within a fluid. They'll discuss their findings at the American Physical Society's 2015 DFD Meeting.
In the fleeting moments after a liquid is subjected to a sudden change in pressure, microscopic bubbles rapidly form and collapse in a process known as cavitation. In the human brain, this is believed to be a mechanistic cause of traumatic brain injury, or TBI, but the phenomenon has yet to be directly observed in brain tissue because the bubbles appear and disappear within microseconds. To address this, researchers are seeking to understand how cavitation might injure neurons by using a 3-D imaging system coupled with a diffraction grating to examine their post-exposure morphology. They will present their recent findings APS’s DFD 2015 Meeting.
Last year Italy sent an espresso machine up to the ISS, and this inspired a team of researchers to study the related strange fluids phenomena in low gravity, such as espresso crema formation and containment of potentially hazardous drinks within a spacecraft. To do this, the researchers designed a cup that exploits surface tension as opposed to gravity and during APS’s DFD Meeting they'll present their findings about how it's working aboard the Space Station.
Have you ever wondered why insects move in the funky ways they do? Or how physical laws shape the design of animals' sensors and neural computation for locomotion? These are a just a few of the questions Cornell University researchers are exploring within this realm, and during APS’s DFD 2015 Meeting, Z. Jane Wang, a Professor of Physics and of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and one of her students, James Melfi Jr., will share their findings.
Monday, Nov. 23: A Live Streamed Event on the Physics of Surfing, the Complex Secrets of the Sneeze, a Flounder’s Disappearing Act, and How Fur Keeps Animals Warm in Cold Water -- News from the 68th Annual Meeting of APS Division of Fluid Dynamics in Boston
However commonplace it may be in human life, the sneeze remains somewhat of an enigma to science, and we are still a long way from understanding the simple sneeze in all its phlegm-flam glory. This month during APS’s DFD 2015 Meeting, researchers will present new work that shows how droplets are formed within a high-propulsion sneeze cloud -- a critical piece of the puzzle that has so far been missing.
Rather than relying on a thick layer of body fat for insulation as many aquatic mammals do, some seabirds and semiaquatic mammals such as fur seals and otters trap a layer of air in their feathers and furs for thermal insulation against the ice cold drink. Now a team of researchers from MIT has experimentally studied the trapping of air in hairy surfaces and the water-repellent properties of undeformable hairy textures, which is key for animals’ thermal regulation. The researchers will present the study at APS’s DFD Fall 2015 Meeting.
Antarctic penguins live in a bitterly cold place, where the air temperature can drop to -40 degrees Celsius and the winds can hurtle at speeds of 40 meters per second. Although these birds routinely hop in and out of the water in sub-freezing temperatures, they manage to keep ice from coating their feathers. Now researchers have examined penguin feathers in extreme detail and think they know the penguins' anti-icing trick: a combination of nanostructures and a special oil make Antarctic penguin feathers ultra-water-repelling, or superhydrophobic. The researchers will present their findings at APS's DFD Fall 2015 Meeting.
Drifting snow is a complicated and poorly understood process that is important to fathom because it accounts for a major fraction of wind-blown snow redistribution within polar and mountainous regions of the world. To understand it better, a group researchers is exploring mass and momentum fluxes during drifting snow events, pursuing an improved understanding of the link between snow cover erosion and deposition. They will present their findings at APS’s DFD 2015 Meeting.
The future of bio-inspired engineering or robotics will greatly benefit from lessons learned from plants, according to a group of Seoul National University researchers. During the American Physical Society's 68th Annual Meeting of the Division of Fluid Dynamics, Nov. 22-24, 2015, in Boston, they will share details about how studying plants enabled them to create tiny robots powered exclusively by changes in humidity.
University of Washington engineers have developed a novel technology that uses a Wi-Fi router — a source of ubiquitous but untapped energy in indoor environments — to power devices without sacrificing network performance.
The long, shallow grooves lining the surface of Phobos are likely early signs of the structural failure that will ultimately destroy this moon of Mars.
Organized extracurricular sport activities for children help them develop and improve cognitive skills, such as greater concentration capacity, that can in term greatly help them in the classroom, says Université de Montréal professor Linda Pagani.
Concerts held within Hanoks are popular tourist attractions in Korea, and when a team of researchers from Soongsil University in Seoul discovered this, they set out to explore whether the homes’ excellent acoustics stem from their architectural structure as well as materials. During ASA’s Fall 2015 Meeting, being held Nov. 2-6, in Jacksonville, Fla., the team will describe their findings analyzing the harmony that results from playing traditional instruments within Hanoks.
While scientists are still investigating the causes of colony collapse disorder, beekeepers could benefit from technologies that help them track the health of their hives, and researchers have developed a device that can monitor hive activity without disturbing the bees. It picks up and analyzes vibrations from special types of bee vocalizations and has successfully tracked changes in bee activity from day to night, and seasonally, by monitoring the occurrences of this specific signal. The team will present their results at ASA’s Fall 2015 Meeting.
A Himalayan singing bowl operates like a wine glass -- slide your fingertip, or a wooden stick called a puja, around its rim to hear its soothing tones. The bowls have been used for meditation and worship for centuries, but have found new audiences in contemporary music. Researchers have studied the motion of the bowl and revealed the origin of “chatter,” which occurs when the puja is played against the bowl. The study will be presented at ASA’s Fall 2015 Meeting.
Anti-electrostatic hydrogen bonding systems have the same charge, yet nevertheless stick together because of the hydrogen bonds, students discover.
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