Darwin in his time wondered about the existence of ants – how can natural selection as a process based on individual reproductive success give rise to sterile individuals such as ant workers? The solution comes from kin selection theory, which holds that an individual’s reproductive success can also be measured in the number of collateral kin produced. This is how the ants have solved the problem. In an ant colony with only one queen all the workers are her offspring and will in practice help to

The relatively powerful earthquake that hit eastern France last Saturday confirms the findings of the postgraduate research currently being conducted by Gideon Lopes Cardozo at the Université Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg and the Faculty of Earth and Life Sciences at the VU Amsterdam. Lopes Cardozo is investigating the causes of earthquakes in the southern part of the Rhine Graben. His research is sponsored by the European Union and has shown that the movements in the earth’s crust in the area around t

Odour is an affective stimulus that elicits both positive as well as negative emotional responses. This has implications for the way consumers evaluate products. Odour as a marketing tool has received an increased amount of attention recently. Retailers are exploring the impact of scents on consumers’ purchase behaviour (think for example about the smell of fresh pastries when you enter a supermarket). Nowadays, technological developments enable the use of scent-patches on packaging and ads, which ma

The way a person taps a number into a cash machine or mobile phone, could, according to scientists at the University of Southampton, be used as a means of identification, and prove useful in the battle against fraud.

Professor Neil White of the University of Southampton’s Department of Electronics and Computer Science has developed an inexpensive sensor, which can be integrated into objects of various shapes and sizes, including smart cards and hand-held devices such as mobile phones.

As the deadline for compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act draws closer, the commuter and passenger trains used in large swaths of the United States remain inaccessible to passengers in wheelchairs. Meanwhile, the elevated platforms many regional rail systems have erected to address this problem have created another, forcing bulky freight shipments off the rails and onto some of the busiest roadways in the nation.

Enter an engineering professor from the University of Pennsylvani

The same in-road detectors that control traffic lights and monitor traffic could soon respond quicker to traffic jams, thanks to software developed by an Ohio State University engineer.

In tests, the software helped California road crews discover traffic jams three times faster than before, allowing them to clear accidents and restore traffic flow before many other drivers would be delayed.

This technology could also provide drivers with the information they need to plan efficient