Interdisciplinary Research

Some of the world’s leading scientists are rubbing shoulders with experts at the University of Abertay Dundee to study tiny plant-like organisms that could unlock billion dollar industries for Europe.

Representatives from famous European universities and research centres, including the renowned Pasteur Institute in Paris and the Czech Academy of Sciences, are putting algae under the microscope in a project considered so important by the EU that it has been given a 1.75m Euro grant (around £1

Shared names prompt good deeds.

When seeking help from a stranger, ask someone who shares your name: people are more likely to assist a namesake, an e-mail study has revealed 1 .

A shared name indicates two people are likely to share genes, so evolution may have taught us to be nice to our namesakes, suggests psychologist Margo Wilson who carried out the study at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.

Unusual names are particularly good a

CORDIS, the European Commission`s Research and Development Information Service, is offering a new online service dedicated to science and technology foresight and the future of European research. The service is part of the re-launch of a redesigned and upgraded CORDIS `Research beyond 2002` site to reflect the latest developments on both the European research area (ERA) and the Sixth Framework programme (FP6).

Technology Foresight

The new service provides information on res

Dental diary of a teenage hominid aged 1.5 million years.

Our early ancestors never went through the awkward age, suggests a new analysis of dental records. Extended youth may have emerged relatively late in human evolution.

Although apes cut the apron strings at around 12 years, despairing human parents are well aware that their kids take at least 18 years to grow up. The development of this prolonged growth period is seen as a key event in human evolution, allowing extra ti

It’s official: English football teams score fewer goals.

Soccer teams worldwide are scoring more goals than they ought to be, whereas English teams seem to follow statistical expectations. The news may delight fans outside England, but it is puzzling the physicists who have found that the chance of a high-scoring game is significantly greater than it may first appear 1 .

John Greenhough and colleagues at Warwick University in Coventry, England, analysed the s

The secret of a steady hand is tightening the right muscles.

Controlling the stiffness of some of our muscles lets us manage tricky feats of manipulation, such as keeping a screwdriver in a screw, researchers have found 1 . We tune the stiffness to oppose motions in the direction of instability, such as the sideways slips that would let the screwdriver slide out of the slot.

Although demanding on the brain, this is the most energy-efficient strategy, say Mitsu