Interdisciplinary Research

An ambitious project is underway to build the world’s smallest electronic nose.

If the project succeeds, it is expected that the technology would have many potential applications in areas such as environmental monitoring, healthcare and food safety.

The aim is to combine the odour sensors together with the signal processing components on to a single silicon chip, around a square centimetre in size. The instrument would require very little power and could be held comfortably

Linguists filter languages for sound before meaning.

Bilingual people switch off one language to avoid speaking double Dutch. By first sounding out words in their brain’s dictionary, they may stop one tongue from interfering with another.

Those fluent in two languages rarely mix them up. They switch between language filters that oust foreign words, Thomas Munte of Otto von Guericke University in Magdeburg, Germany, and his team suggest 1 .

Their

Colorado State University is leading a team of researchers who plan to develop sunflowers into a rubber-producing crop, alleviating the harvest of rubber trees in Southeast Asia and Brazil – currently the only natural source of rubber in the world.

The United States is currently totally dependent upon imports for its rubber supply, importing nearly 1.3 million tons a year at a cost of $2 billion. Almost all natural rubber comes from rubber trees including those grown on plantations in Malays

Eddies appear in the ocean like in the atmosphere. Atmospheric eddies are short-lived, extremely speedy, and often very hazardous. Oceanic eddies are slower and can be observed only with the use of special equipment, but these eddies gently mixing ocean waters affect the climate in general.

For more than ten years specialists from the Pacific Institute of Oceanology in Vladivostok have observed the oceanic eddies formed at the confluence of two largest undercurrents in the west of the Pacif

New research by economists at the Universities of Warwick and Oxford has provided surprising information on just how much people hate a winner. It also shows what lengths human beings are prepared to go to damage a winner out of a sense of envy or fairness.

The researchers, Professor Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick and Dr Daniel Zizzo of Oxford, designed a new kind of experiment, played with real cash, where subjects could anonymously “burn” away other people’s money – but only a

Researchers from the University of Amsterdam have demonstrated that the climate in South Mexico changed following the collapse of the Maya empire. From preserved pollen grains the paleoecologists could deduce that the climate quickly became dryer.
The climate becoming dryer, explains the decrease in the population following the collapse of the Maya empire. The climate researchers have therefore helped to solve an archaeological mystery.

With the help of pollen grains, the paleoecologis