Technology

A new bio-inspired algorithm seems to use the social behavior of bee colonies, which allows them to attack in an optimal way, could help dismantle social networks linked to organized crime, jihadist terrorism, or facilitate the design of vaccination strategies capable of containing the spread of a pandemic. The tool automatically detects and identifies the most dangerous actors or nodes within a given social network and the density of the interconnected relationships between them, which may help law enforcement authorities make their decisions and act in the most efficient way possible. Bees…

Cookbooks are popular. Cookbooks are instructional. But they are woefully lacking information about a vital thing - food safety. An analysis of 1,497 recipes from 29 cookbooks that appeared on the New York Times best sellers list for food and diet books, all of which included handling raw animal ingredients, such as meat, poultry, seafood or eggs, didn't note food safety much at all. Specifically, the researchers looked for three things: * Did the recipe tell readers to cook the dish to a specific internal temperature? * If it did include a temperature, is that temperature one that has been…

Data from online video games has been used to study what kinds of practice and habits help people acquire skill. Basically, what does it take to get good? 10,000 hours, as Malcom Gladwell said? Nope, not even close. But there are reasons why some people are great in The Division and you die in the Dark Zone within seconds after meeting another player. Basically, they learned shortcuts and before they ever met you, they warmed up. In a pair of studies, researchers looked at data generated from thousands of online matches of two video games, the first-person shooter game Halo: Reach and the…

Russian author Boris Zhitkov wrote the 1931 short story Microhands, in which the narrator creates miniature hands to carry out intricate surgeries. And while that was nearly 100 years ago, the tale illustrates the real fundamentals of the nanoscience researchers are working on today. Nanoscience is the study of molecules that are one billionth of a metre in size. To put this into perspective, a human hair is between 50,000 and 100,000 nanometers thick. At this tiny size, materials possess properties that lie somewhere between a lump of metal and that of a single atom. This unique environment…

How Wind Turbines Work - A Legal Perspective If you want to know how a wind turbine works you may visit Wikipedia or the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.  You would not normally look for scientific information on a case law web site, but there is now an excellent scientific description of wind turbine basics in a judgement on patent law as applied to a wind turbine design. In Wobben Properties GmbH v Siemens Public Ltd Company&Ors [2017] EWCA Civ 5,  Lord Justice Kitchen sets out the basic science behind wind turbines and their operating principles.  The…

There remain a lack of safeguards built into the health-care system for fitness trackers. Personal health wearable devices that are used to monitor heart rates, sleep patterns, calories, and even stress levels have led to new privacy and security risks. Though watches, fitness bands, and so-called "smart" clothing are part of a growing "connected-health" system in the U.S., promising to provide people with more efficient ways to manage their own health, it isn't a Utopia if you aren't a fan of weak and fragmented health-privacy regulatory system. The authors of a new report are academics, and…

Russian scientists increase DVD storage capacity million times 01.12.2016 Pravda reports - Scientists from Kazan Federal University and their foreign colleagues have developed a new optical data storage technology that makes it possible to increase the capacity of DVD storage a million times. The article published in Nanoscale says that conventional optical storage media, such as DVD or BluRay disks, lag significantly behind hard drives, flash memory and other "hard" drives. According to the scientists, this gap is due to physical causes. It is impossible to create a denser recording of…

Stereoscopes entertained every Victorian home with their ability to produce three-dimensional pictures. Typewriters and later fax machines were once essential for business practices. Photo printers and video rentals came and went from high streets. When innovative technologies like these come to the end of their lives, we have various ways of remembering them. It might be through rediscovery – hipster subculture popularizing retro technologies like valve radios or vinyl, for example. Or it might be by fitting the technology into a narrative of progress, such as the way we laugh at the brick-…

People may soon be able to watch their unborn babies grow in realistic 3-D immersive visualizations, thanks to new technology that transforms MRI and ultrasound data into a 3-D virtual reality model of a fetus. MRI provides high-resolution fetal and placental imaging with excellent contrast. It is generally used in fetal evaluation when ultrasound cannot provide sufficiently high-quality images.  Researchers in Brazil created virtual reality 3-D models based on fetal MRI results. Sequentially-mounted MRI slices are used to begin construction of the model. A segmentation process follows…

At ASN Kidney Week 2016 in Chicago, investigators showed progress toward creating a functional bioartificial kidney that could replace the need for dialysis or transplantation in the millions of patients with kidney failure. A key requirement for such a device is the formation of a "living membrane" that consists of a tight kidney cell layer on artificial membrane surfaces and can transport molecules from one side to the other. In their presentation, Dimitrios Stamatialis, PhD from University of Twente in The Netherlands, Roos Masereeuw, PhD  from University of Utrecht in The…