Innovative students and professors at the University of Rochester have created a navigational assistant that can help inform a visually impaired person of his whereabouts, or even bring new dimensions to museum navigation or campus tours for sighted individuals. The system, nicknamed “NAVI” for Navigational Assistance for the Visually Impaired, uses radio signals to gauge when someone is near passive transponders that can be as small as a grain of rice and located on the outside of a building, on a s
Melbourne scientists plan to harness the strange appetite of newly discovered Australian bacteria to help purify arsenic-contaminated water.
The research group, led by microbiologist Dr Joanne Santini of La Trobe University, is working out how to use bacteria that eat arsenic to clean up contaminated wastewater in Australian and overseas mining environments and drinking wells in Bangladesh and West Bengal, India.
Dr Santini presented her research at Fresh Science, a British Council
What can bees teach us about speed shopping?
Does trading off speed for accuracy pay?
“Bumblebees have been shown to have very fine colour vision – which they can use to find up to 5,000 flowers a day,” says says Melbourne scientist Adrian Dyer who first made the observations whilst working in Germany.
Adrian’s study published in Nature casts light on how they do it – and may help us to learn from the bees how to design robot eyes in the future.
Adrian is
As Mars makes its closest approach in almost 60,000 years, two Australian astronomers have used the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) in Hawaii to look for signs that the planet once had liquid water – and so may have hosted life.
Dr. Jeremy Bailey of the Anglo-Australian Observatory and the Australian Centre for Astrobiology (ACA) at Macquarie University in Sydney, and Sarah Chamberlain, a PhD student at the ACA, have produced what is Bailey says is “perhaps the sharpest image of Ma
Repairing our roads when and where it is needed was the goal for EUREKA project GEOSECMA-PMS. The project team created a complete software ’’toolbox’’ for municipalities and road authorities to assist them in the maintenance of roads and streets, thereby providing a safer, more comfortable ride for the public and savings for local government.
Hans-Goeran Wilhelmsson, chief executive of KORDAB, lead partner in the project, says the results have benefited citizens as well a
New study reveals knowledge of object concepts is less inborn than acquired
The question of how and when we develop our knowledge of object behavior – such as knowing that when a ball rolls behind a sofa, that it is likely to roll out the other side – is an ongoing puzzle in cognitive science. Previously, scientists had thought that infants learned to understand this concept through manual exploration. However, subsequent research indicated that infants developed an understanding of
A First Step Toward Robots the Size of a Grain of Sand
Chemists at the University of California, San Diego have developed minute grains of silicon that spontaneously assemble, orient and sense their local environment, a first step toward the development of robots the size of sand grains that could be used in medicine, bioterrorism surveillance and pollution monitoring.
In a paper to be published in September in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which will
In B science fiction movies, a terrible force often pushes the Earth off its axis and spells disaster for all life on Earth. In reality, life would still be possible on Earth and any Earth-like planets if the axis tilt were greater than it is now, according to Penn State researchers.
“We do not currently have observations of extrasolar planets, but I imagine that in the near future, we will uncover some of these small planets,” says Dr. Darren M. Williams, assistant professor of physics and
A long-standing medical discussion about how transplanted organs survive in a new body has received provocative new evidence from Mayo Clinic research. It shows a donated kidney survives in a new body by turning on a protective mechanism to shield it from the hostile environment of the patient’s immune system. The results are published in this month’s American Journal of Transplantation.
Says Mark Stegall, M.D., head of the transplant team that studied kidney genes’ response
The tedious laboratory trial-and-error method for refining protein/peptide-based medicines could be accelerated and complemented by an innovative in silico (on computer) protein design method, according to researchers at Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and the University of California at Riverside.
Their findings, appearing in a recent issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society, could drastically decrease the time it takes to move potentia
Some of the defenses plants use to fight off disease leave them more susceptible to attack by insects, according to a Don Cipollini, Ph.D., a chemical ecologist at Wright State University.
Cipollini, an assistant professor of biological sciences, will present a research paper on this topic at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America in Savannah, Ga., on Tuesday, Aug. 5. Some 3,000 national and international scientists are expected to attend the meeting.
“Plant Resis
Radiologists are experimenting with contrast digital mammography to better diagnose cancer in dense breasts, according to a study appearing in the September issue of the journal Radiology.
“This advanced digital application is increasing the potential of mammography,” said the study’s lead author, Roberta A. Jong, M.D. “Contrast digital mammography makes cancers stand out against dense breast tissue that previously hid tumors with conventional film mammography,” said Dr. Jong, assistan
In keeping with a national trend, surgeons at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital say a new, less invasive approach to removing a kidney from a living donor is prompting more people to give one of their kidneys to someone in need of a transplant.
Over the past four years, the number of people donating a kidney at the hospital has doubled, from 14 in 1999 to 28 in 2002.
This is consistent with increases seen at other kidney transplant centers since the introduction several years ago
The majority of epilepsy patients who are seizure-free for the first year after surgery will have a favorable long-term outcome, according to a study in the August 26 issue of Neurology, the scientific journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The study examined 175 patients with intractable epilepsy (when the condition is not relieved by medication) who had surgery that removed a small portion of the brain identified as a region involved in seizure generation, and who were seizure-free
On 27 August 2003, Mars is less than 56 million kilometres away – approaching closer to our planet than it has done in over 60 000 years.
About the same time as this closest approach, Mars Express passes the halfway mark of its journey, in terms of distance along its trajectory. On 1 September 2003, as it hurtles through space at 10 800 kilometres per hour, the spacecraft will have covered over 242 million kilometres, half of the total of 485 million kilometres needed to arrive at Mar
Over the last decade the market has had a tendency to value food products that are healthy and safe and encourage healthy lifestyles, with the added parameter that their associated production processes are environmentally sound. In the case of systems of cattle production the current and future aim is the obtaining of a quality product within an environmentally and economically sustainable framework.
Both objectives ultimately depend on animal feeding. The composition of the diet can have r
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