News

£4.9 Million To Develop Invisibility Cloaks

Research into designing and building unique 'metamaterials' has received a £4.9 million funding boost from The Leverhulme Trust, it is announced today. Metamaterials can be used for invisibility 'cloaking' devices, sensitive security sensors that can detect tiny quantities of dangerous substances, and flat lenses that can be used to image tiny objects much smaller than the wavelength of light.

Warm-Blooded Dinosaurs Worked Up A Sweat

Were dinosaurs "warm-blooded" like present-day mammals and birds, or "cold-blooded" like present day lizards? The implications of this simple-sounding question go beyond deciding whether or not you'd snuggle up to a dinosaur on a cold winter's evening.

In a study published this week in the journal PLoS ONE, a team of researchers, including Herman Pontzer, Ph.D., assistant professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences, has found strong evidence that many dinosaur species were probably warm-blooded.

Avatars Can Negatively Affect Users

Although often seen as an inconsequential feature of digital technologies, one's self-representation, or avatar, in a virtual environment can affect the user's thoughts, according to research by a University of Texas at Austin communication professor.

Nano-Devices Developed By U Of T Researchers

University of Toronto (U of T) researchers continue to uncover the mysteries of space. But even the best astronauts in the world are stymied if the spaceship doesn't launch.

Small Asteroid 2009 VA Whizzes By The Earth

A newly discovered asteroid designated 2009 VA, which is only about 7 meters in size, passed about 2 Earth radii (14,000 km) from the Earth's surface Nov. 6 at around 16:30 EST. This is the third-closest known (non-impacting) Earth approach on record for a cataloged asteroid.

Magnetic Nanoparticles To Treat Our Cells

Whether it’s magnetic nanoparticles (mNPs) giving an army of ‘therapeutically armed’ white blood cells direction to invade a deadly tumour’s territory, or the use of mNPs to target specific nerve channels and induce nerve-led behaviour (such as the life-dependant thumping of our hearts), mNPs have come a long way in the past decade.

Design Military Strategies Based On Ants

A researcher of the University of Granada has designed a new system for the mobility of military troops within a battlefield based on the mechanisms used by ant colonies to move using a commercial videogame.

This work, developed at the department of Computer Architecture and Technology of the UGR, has designed several algorithms that permit to look for the best route path (this is, to find the better route to satisfy certain criteria) within a particular environment.

See How Bacteria Talk To One Another

Using imaging mass spectrometry, researchers at the University of California - San Diego have developed tools that will enable scientists to visualize how different cell populations of cells communicate. Their study shows how bacteria talk to one another – an understanding that may lead to new therapeutic discoveries for diseases ranging from cancer to diabetes and allergies.

A Chaotic Planetary System Found

Before our planets found their way to the stable orbits they circle in today, they wiggled and jostled about like unsettled children. Now, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has found a young star with evidence for the same kind of orbital hyperactivity. Young planets circling the star are thought to be disturbing smaller comet-like bodies, causing them to collide and kick up a huge halo of dust.

Dropouts Pinpoint Earliest Galaxies

Astronomers, conducting the broadest survey to date of galaxies from about 800 million years after the Big Bang, have found 22 early galaxies and confirmed the age of one by its characteristic hydrogen signature at 787 million years post Big Bang. The finding is the first age-confirmation of a so-called dropout galaxy at that distant time and pinpoints when an era called the reionization epoch likely began. The research will be published in a December issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

India's Annual Science Fiction Event - 2009

The Annual science fiction event is returning. Last year, the event was organised in Varanasi, one of the oldest cities of the world in the North India. Making it a national event, this year the event is being organised at Aurangabad.

Sabertoothed Males Were Pussycats

Despite their fearsome fangs, male sabertoothed cats may have been less aggressive than many of their feline cousins, says a new study of male-female size differences in extinct big cats.

Ultra-Primitive Particles Found In Comet Dust

Dust samples collected by high-flying aircraft in the upper atmosphere have yielded an unexpectedly rich trove of relicts from the ancient cosmos, report scientists from the Carnegie Institution. The stratospheric dust includes minute grains that likely formed inside stars that lived and died long before the birth of our sun, as well as material from molecular clouds in interstellar space.

World's First Arabic-Speaking Robot

Robot The Interactive Robots and Media Laboratory (IRML) of the United Arab Emirates University has developed the world's first Arabic-speaking humanoid robot. The first humanoid robot is named after the 11th century Islamic philosopher and doctor, IbnSina.

Jet Propulsion Laboratory Co-Founder Dead

Tsien Hsue-Shen, PhD '39, a Caltech alumnus and one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, died on October 31. He was 98. Tsien worked for the U.S. military on advanced rocket projects and had been commended by the U.S. Air Force for his contributions to its technological development after World War II. But in 1950, the Chinese-born scientist was accused of harboring Communist sympathies and stripped of his security clearance.

Hidden Territory On Mercury Revealed

The MESSENGER spacecraft's third flyby of the planet Mercury has given scientists, for the first time, an almost complete view of the planet's surface and revealed some dramatic changes in Mercury's comet-like tail.

Structure Of The Universe

A detailed picture of the seeds of structures in the universe has been unveiled by an international team co-led by Sarah Church of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, jointly located at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University, and by Walter Gear, of Cardiff University in the United Kingdom.

Speed Limit Of Evolution

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have developed a theoretical model that informs the understanding of evolution and determines how quickly an organism will evolve using a catalogue of “evolutionary speed limits.” The model provides quantitative predictions for the speed of evolution on various “fitness landscapes,” the dynamic and varied conditions under which bacteria, viruses and even humans adapt.

DreamWorks Studios Gets Control Over Robopocalypse

DreamWorks Studios and Doubleday have acquired, in a pre-emptive deal, the rights to Daniel H. Wilson's unpublished manuscript, "Robopocalypse," it was announced today by Mark Sourian and Holly Bario, Co-Presidents of Production at the studio, and Jason Kaufman, Executive Editor and Vice President, at Doubleday.

100-Year-Old Mystery Solved: The Origin of Cosmic Rays Found

Nearly 100 years ago, scientists detected the first signs of cosmic rays - subatomic particles (mostly protons) that zip through space at nearly the speed of light. The most energetic cosmic rays hit with the punch of a 98-mph fastball, even though they are smaller than an atom. Astronomers questioned what natural force could accelerate particles to such a speed. New evidence from the VERITAS telescope array shows that cosmic rays likely are powered by exploding stars and stellar "winds."

	The Ash Virus
	The Tale of Bob
	Mission 197
	R. L. Vogeler’s “Reminiscence of an American Dream”
	New Sci-Fi Thriller 'SABER Ladder' by Cory Richardson

Main menu