It looks like a cross between a Hummer and a tank.
But the squat, pug-nosed car with brown body panels in place of its windshield and windows is radically different from any vehicle on today’s roads or battlefields. Designed, built and outfitted by the University of Florida and a Utah company called Autonomous Solutions, it is a robot car built for one purpose: to compete against other “autonomous” vehicles in a U.S. defense agency-sponsored race this spring from Los Angeles to L
Potential applications in medicine, remote sensing, imaging and satellite communications
A world that consumes information in gigabytes may one day find terahertz-sized solutions for some of its most pressing problems.
While one gigabyte is equal to one billion (109) bytes of information, a terahertz (THz) is a unit of electromagnetic-wave frequency equivalent to one trillion (1012) hertz, with one hertz equaling one cycle per second.
Terahertz (THz) frequencies, r
Plant sterols — recognized for their cholesterol-lowering power when added to margarines, salad dressings and other fats — are just as effective in reducing low-density lipoprotein, or “bad” cholesterol” levels, when added to orange juice, say researchers at UC Davis School of Medicine and Medical Center.
The results, based on a 10-week study of 72 healthy volunteers with mildly elevated cholesterol levels, are published in the March 8 issue of the American Heart Association’s journa
Trophy hunters prize the regal lion above virtually all other animals, but shooting lions without overhunting is tricky. Excessive trophy hunting could open the door for too many young males to invade prides and kill all the cubs, causing a population decline. On the other hand, income from trophy hunting helps sustain African game reserves, which might otherwise be converted to small-scale agriculture. In an effort to reconcile the needs of lions and of people who manage their populations, Universit
People on diets should be forgiven for moaning that chocolate tastes better when you’re hungry. Just missing breakfast makes you more sensitive to sweet and salty tastes, according to research published this week in BMC Neuroscience.
Hunger could increase your ability to taste, by increasing the sensitivity of the taste receptors on your tongue, or by changing the way you perceive the same taste stimuli, the author suggests.
Professor Zverev from the University of Malawi persua
Visible from ESA’s Proba spacecraft 600 kilometres away in space are the largest of the many Nasca Lines; ancient desert markings now at risk from human encroachment as well as flood events feared to be increasing in frequency.
Designated a World Heritage Site in 1994, the Lines are a mixture of animal figures and long straight lines etched across an area of about 70 km by 30 km on the Nasca plain, between the Andes and Pacific Coast at the southern end of Peru. The oldest lines date from a
Drugs based on CSIRO’s research into the influenza virus have been shown to be effective, in laboratory tests, against a sample of an H5N1 influenza virus currently infecting chickens in Asia.
CSIRO Health Sciences and Nutrition scientist, Dr Jenny McKimm-Breschkin, has tested the ability of the flu drug Relenza™ to inhibit the virus, known as H5N1 strain, which has killed millions of chickens in Asia and has been responsible for several human deaths this year.
The tests, used to m
Malaria, which infects 600 million people in the world and leads annually to 2 million deaths, is the most widespread of infectious diseases. The pathological agent is a microscopic parasite of the Plasmodium genus which develops inside the host’s erythrocytes.
Plasmodia go through a series of asexual reproduction cycles before a transition takes place from asexual stages to production of sexual cells, the gametocytes or pre-gametes, in the host blood. The females of Anopheles, the mosquito
The Vanuatu island arc, in the South-West Pacific, is 1 700 km long. It corresponds to a convergence zone where the Australian plate is slipping eastwards under the North Fiji Basin, which is part of the Pacific plate, thus generating earthquakes. On 26 November 1999, the central islands of Vanuatu, particularly Ambrym and Pentecost, were strongly shaken by a 7.5 magnitude surface earthquake followed by a tsunami. The earthquake and the many landslips it generated caused 10 deaths and considerable d
Findings in science advance understanding of intestinal cholesterol pathway and action of Zetia, a cholesterol absorption inhibitor complementary to statin therapy
In a major advance in understanding the intestinal pathway for cholesterol absorption and the mechanism of action for ZETIATM (ezetimibe), scientists at Schering-Plough Research Institute (SPRI) have identified and characterized a long sought protein critical to intestinal cholesterol absorption. In an article published in
New studies are the first to document changes induced by placebo in the brain’s pain pathways
Researchers have produced the strongest evidence yet that placebo–or the mere expectation of relief, with no real treatment–causes physical changes in how the brain responds to pain. Their report appears in the Feb. 20 issue of Science.
In two related studies at the Ann Arbor Veterans Affairs (VA) Health Care System, University of Michigan and Princeton University, researcher
Findings extend longevity research from yeast and worms to mammals
Researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston have discovered how two key cellular influences on lifespan work together, providing insights that may help reveal aging mechanisms in humans. The findings extend longevity research from yeast and worms into mammals, and suggest that longer life results, at least in part, from biochemical interactions that boost cells’ ability to resist environmental stresses while in
A century ago, when biologists used to talk about the primordial soup from which all life on Earth came, they probably never imagined from how far away the ingredients may have come. Recent findings have the origins of life reaching far out from what was once considered “the home planet.” Evolution on the early Earth may have been influenced by some pretty far-out stuff.
In a paper published this week in the journal Science, Arizona State University Chemistry Professor Sandra Pizzarello cla
Scientists have developed a new system that uses basic information about the ecology of “vector” borne diseases – malaria, Lyme disease or some of the new emerging diseases such as Avian flu – to mathematically predict how they might change, spread and pose new risks to human health.
The approach, developed by researchers from Oregon State University and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, could become enormously valuable to agencies that are trying to understand what a disease might d
Researchers at Oregon State University have created purple-fruited tomatoes that include anthocyanins – the same class of health-promoting pigments in red wine that function as antioxidants and are believed to prevent heart disease.
Their research is featured as the cover story in the latest issue of the Journal of Heredity.
Domestic tomato varieties grown and consumed in the United States do not normally produce fruit containing any anthocyanin, explained Jim Myers, OSU’s Ba
New evidence in animals suggests that theories about how the brain processes sight, sound and touch may need updating. Researchers from Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center and colleagues report their findings in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Using electrodes smaller than a human hair, researchers from Wake Forest Baptist and the University of California at San Francisco recorded individual cell activity in the brains of 31 adult rats. Th
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