Iceland is a small country tucked away on the edge of Europe. It has a population of only about 340,000 people. Iceland's prisons are small too. There are only five, altogether housing fewer than 200 prisoners. Of these five, two are open prisons. I had visited them both before, … | Continue reading
Telecommunications is becoming ever more important for vehicles. At TU Wien, a new antenna concept has now been developed for cars. | Continue reading
Bacteria have established various strategies to infect organisms and use them as sources of nutrients. Many microbes use toxins that break down membranes by simply piercing through the outer shell of the cells. Human-pathogenic bacteria such as the plague bacterium Yersinia pesti … | Continue reading
Time travel to the UK in 2025: Harry is a teenager with a smartphone and Pauline is a senior citizen with Alzheimer's who relies on smart glasses for independent living. Harry is frustrated his favourite online game is slow, and Pauline is anxious since her healthcare app is unre … | Continue reading
To evaluate in vivo physiological functions, electrophysiological signals must be monitored with high precision and high spatial or temporal resolution. Ultraflexible, multielectrode arrays (MEAs) were recently fabricated to establish conformal contact on the surfaces of organs a … | Continue reading
Ingesting cannabis can be a pleasant experience for people but for dogs and cats, it will almost certainly require a visit to the vet. | Continue reading
Ribonucleic acid (RNA) is, along with DNA and protein, one of the three primary biological macromolecules and was probably the first to arise in early life forms. In the "RNA world" hypothesis, RNA is able to support life on its own because it can both store information and catal … | Continue reading
An international team of astronomers has detected a new luminous quasar at a redshift of 7.02. The newly found quasi-stellar object (QSO), designated DELS J003836.10–152723.6, is the most luminous quasar known at a redshift of over 7.0. The discovery is reported in a paper publis … | Continue reading
Performing the mental gymnastics of making the phoenetic distinction between words and phrases such as "I'm hear" to "I'm here" or "I can't so but tons" to "I can't sew buttons," is familiar to anyone who has encountered autocorrected text messages, punny social media posts and t … | Continue reading
For Cainnon Gregg, 2018 started out as a great year. After leaving his job as an installation artist to become a full-time oyster farmer in Wakulla County, Florida in 2017, Gregg began raising small oysters in baskets or bags suspended in the shallow, productive coastal waters of … | Continue reading
A trio of researchers from CSIC-Universitat de València and Universitat de Barcelona has used data from the IceCube detector in Antarctica to measure Earth's mass. In their paper published in the journal Nature Physics, Andrea Donini, Sergio Palomares-Ruiz and Jordi Salvado descr … | Continue reading
A team of scientists at DESY and Universität Hamburg has reached another milestone towards the direct imaging of individual biomolecules: the group led by Jochen Küpper from the Center for Free-Electron Laser Science developed a new experimental technique which enables the separa … | Continue reading
Gardeners might end up never planting the wrong bulb again after the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) and Reading University successfully mapped a daffodil's chloroplast genome for the first time. | Continue reading
The world's tropical oceans are suffering turbulent times. Dire predictions of yet more disastrous coral bleaching episodes have been released, placing the very future of wonders like the Great Barrier Reef in danger. Without global action to prevent runaway climate change, we as … | Continue reading
Elke van Nieuwenhuijzen will be receiving her doctorate next Wednesday, 7 November, at Eindhoven University of Technology for her study of black fungus on oiled wood that behaves like a 'biofinish.' This layer colors the wood and actually protects it from wood rot and degradation … | Continue reading
How did sound propagate inside the Mosque of Cordoba in the time of Abd al-Rahman I? Today, thanks to virtual simulation tools, it is possible to know the sound fields of spaces that no longer exist. This field of work is known as acoustic archaeology by some researchers. Working … | Continue reading
In American criminology, crime and other forms of deviance have often been attributed to individuals' definitions or internalized attitudes toward deviance. In previous studies, however, empirical tests of the causal processes of learning attitudes toward deviance have been relat … | Continue reading
Erik Trinkaus, an anthropologist at Washington University, has found what he describes as "an abundance of developmental anomalies" in people that lived during the Pleistocene. In his paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, he describes his study of fo … | Continue reading
Hitting a material with laser light sends vibrations rippling through its latticework of atoms, and at the same time can nudge the lattice into a new configuration with potentially useful properties – turning an insulator into a metal, for instance. | Continue reading
Soon you may no longer have to worry about how long your dental repairs will last. A new dental reconstruction material developed in Sweden offers unprecedented improvements over existing acrylate-based fillers. | Continue reading
There was a huge amount of excitement when the Higgs boson was first spotted back in 2012 – a discovery that bagged the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2013. The particle completed the so-called standard model, our current best theory of understanding nature at the level of particles. | Continue reading
A team from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) developed a novel nanostructure embedded into a semiconductor nanofibre that results in superb conductivity. The nanocomposite addresses a key inhibitor to conductivity, with the potential to improve a wide range of applica … | Continue reading
No doubt about it, NASA explores some of the most awe-inspiring locations in our solar system and beyond. Once seen, who can forget the majesty of astronaut Jim Irwin standing before the stark beauty of the Moon's Hadley Apennine mountain range, of the Hubble Space Telescope's go … | Continue reading
A study conducted by an international team of researchers led by Agustín Sánchez-Lavega, professor of Physics at the UPV/EHU, reveals the existence of a rich diversity in the atmospheric phenomena confined inside Jupiter's spot as a result of the intense hurricane winds blowing a … | Continue reading
An international research team used a computer model to reconstruct the history of glaciation in the Alps, visualising it in a two-minute computer animation. The simulation aims to enable a better understanding of the mechanisms of glaciation. | Continue reading
The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-On (GRACE-FO) mission has resumed collecting science-quality data and planned in-orbit checks after successfully completing a switchover to a backup system in the microwave instrument (MWI) on one of the mission's twin spacecraft … | Continue reading
The latest advances in computing and virtual reality (VR) have enabled researchers at KAUST to develop a suite of apps that allow users to visualize and interpret large and complex datasets in three dimensions. | Continue reading
Drones are becoming ubiquitous—they help bridge inspectors examine otherwise inaccessible spaces, monitor crop health for farmers, and assist search and rescue teams. They are also a boon to bad guys, from drug runners to terrorists. That's where David Kovar, F17, comes in. He's … | Continue reading
Usually, researchers study the effect communications have on the target of a message, says Alcides Velasquez, University of Kansas assistant professor of communication studies. But in the case of a new study on social media and Latino political participation, Velasquez and his co … | Continue reading
As the Northern hemisphere starts to feel the cold winter approaching, research stations in Antarctica are emerging from their long dark winter and awaiting the arrival of fresh supplies after living months in isolation. | Continue reading
UCLA researchers invented a portable device that uses holograms and machine learning to identify and measure airborne biological particles, or bioaerosols, that originate from living organisms such as plants or fungi. Trained to recognize five common allergens—pollen from Bermuda … | Continue reading
When considering whether to buy stock in a company, investors often look to the trading activity of the company's top executives. If the CEO or CFO has recently made large purchases of company stock, investors tend to assume the stock price is about to go up; if they are selling … | Continue reading
Arctic sea ice loss in the last 37 year is not due to humans alone. | Continue reading
Women in Africa with little formal education are delaying marriage—much like their better-educated peers, a new University of Michigan study indicates. | Continue reading
Voters will have their voices heard during Tuesday's midterm elections. Walter Mebane, professor of political science and statistics at the University of Michigan, is an expert on election forensics, a field devoted to using statistical methods to determine whether the results of … | Continue reading
Diverse communities of plants and animals typically perform better than monocultures. However, the mechanisms that are responsible for this have so far been a mystery to science. Biologists at the University of Zurich have now been able to identify the genetic cause of these effe … | Continue reading
A new test for industrial catalysts developed by chemists at Utrecht University uses fluorescent molecules to show which of three catalysts works better than the others. This makes it much easier to work on improving the catalysts, while also making production processes in the ch … | Continue reading
A collective-risk dilemma experiment with members of the public in Barcelona shows that people are more or less likely to contribute money to fight climate change depending on their wealth. And the results indicate that participants with fewer resources were prepared to contribut … | Continue reading
Scientists at the RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science in Japan have found that the protein NGA1 is critical for plants to have normal responses to dehydration. Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study shows how NGA1 controls transcription … | Continue reading
Quantum systems can be manipulated with extremely high precision, but not perfectly. Researchers in the Department of Physics at ETH Zurich have now demonstrated how to monitor and correct errors that occur during such operations. | Continue reading
Researchers from the Julius Kühn Institut, Germany have found that produce is a reservoir for transferable antibiotic resistance genes that often escape traditional molecular detection methods. These antibiotic resistance genes might escape cultivation-independent detection, but … | Continue reading
A man has died after being mauled by a shark in the third such attack in two months at a popular tourist site on Australia's Great Barrier Reef, authorities said Tuesday. | Continue reading
Online leader Amazon Inc. refused comment Tuesday on reports that it plans to split its new headquarters between two locations, possibly in New York City and Arlington, Virginia. | Continue reading
Toyota Motor Corp. reported a 28 percent surge in the last quarter on growing sales in Europe, Asia and the Americas and cost cutting. It raised its profit forecast for the full year. | Continue reading
A piranha's bite is definitely worse than its bark, but the bark has uses too. A new study of the sounds made by piranhas in the Amazon finds that their underwater "barks" are an effective tool for identifying different species in murky waters. | Continue reading
With thousands of fans clapping, chanting, shouting and jeering, college basketball games can be almost deafeningly loud. Some arenas have decibel meters, which, accurately or not, provide some indication of the noise volume generated by the spectators and the sound systems. Howe … | Continue reading
Tennessee and Alabama will get their largest solar power projects yet, to supply a Facebook data center with 100 percent renewable energy. | Continue reading
French tyre manufacturer Michelin announced plans Monday to close a Scottish manufacturing plant with 845 employees due to growing competition from cheeper products in Asia. | Continue reading