Technology

Cycling for Science #1 - Tensegrity Velocipedological science Cycling is more than just a pleasant way to keep fit: it is a pleasant way to learn some interesting velocipedological science facts.  Don't just exercise your muscles: exercise your brain by cycling for science. Scientists with too much time on their hands have spent more than a century trying to understand how bikes ride and steer and fail to fall down in the way they do.Phil Daoust The first and most important scientific fact about the bicycle is that you can never own enough bikes.  This fact may be expressed as a…

New molecules known as synthetic antibody mimics (SyAMs) attach themselves simultaneously to disease cells and disease-fighting cells. The result is a highly targeted immune response, similar to the action of natural human antibodies;  with both the targeting and response functions. The paper looks specifically at SyAM molecules used to attack prostate cancer. Called SyAM-Ps, they work first by recognizing cancer cells and binding with a specific protein on their surface. Next, they also bind with a receptor on an immune cell. This induces a targeted response that leads to the…

Though drugs spend years in development and hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars are spent in increasingly demanding clinical trials before approval, a lot of prescription drugs get added warning labels - or can even be withdrawn - after release to the public because of hidden toxicity that clinical trials did not find.  A new toxicity test invented at the University of Utah could make it possible to uncover dangerous side effects earlier in pharmaceutical development. Their proof of concept was a test on Paxil, an antidepressant used by some pregnant women that became linked…

"You think you're in pain now, but this is not going to look good on Facebook tomorrow." Stefano Bolognini/National Museum of Denmark By Arosha K Bandara, The Open University The immense popularity of social media seems to have redefined “privacy” from the sense of keeping information secret to being in control over how information is shared – among friends, colleagues, companies or the government. Perhaps it’s no surprise then that the world’s largest social network, Facebook, has announced it’s aim to develop algorithms that could protect us from ourselves and the danger of the “overshare…

Not now! Roboscribe is busy creating a masterpiece (of heuristic analysis). gastev, CC BY By Peter McOwan, Queen Mary University of London The human race has long designed and used tools to help us solve problems, from flint axes to space shuttles. They affect our lives and shape society in expected and sometimes unexpected ways. We may understand how these tools work – after all, we built them – but sometimes it’s the use they’re put to that surprises. Artificial intelligence is one such tool: software that mimics the way that natural intelligence functions. Like an information loom it…

You're a vegetarian? But your subconscious ordered the Meat Lover's! BrokenSphere, CC BY-SA By John M. Henderson,University of South Carolina If you prefer to order your pizza without going through all the trouble of actually speaking, Pizza Hut has just the thing for you — “the world’s first subconscious menu.” You sit down, glance through the menu, and before you say anything or even make a conscious decision, the menu has figured out which toppings you’d like on your pizza and places your order. Pizza Hut recently began testing the technology in some of its UK restaurants. This mind-…

The Obamacare website is not the only thing that debuted incomplete, buggy, difficult to use and nonetheless mandated. The Open Payments Program database, also known as the Physician Payments Sunshine Act, was 12 years in the making and designed to report drug and device industry payments to physicians, but it came onto the scene with a resounding thud, burdensome to most and helping almost no one. But it is too important to dismiss before its shortcomings are addressed, say the authors of a Viewpoint in JAMA. There is a belief that payments to doctors by drug companies - for example, if a…

A few years ago, Europe had a policy making it illegal to sell fruit that was not cosmetically ideal. People overpaying for food deserve to have it aesthetically pleasing as well, was the reasoning, and having someone buy ugly fruit was a sign of inequality. That policy was changed but for people who want to pay to have ideal fruit, there are still ways:  recently have demonstrated a laser biospeckle technique capable of detecting fruits' "climacteric peak" so it will always be harvested at just the right time. That means apples, bananas, pears and tomatoes could be available to well-…

Sunlight is the best medicine. rishibando, CC BY-NC By Christopher Sampson, University of Nottingham What is it that sets academic publications apart from articles on The Conversation? Peer review might be your first answer. While The Conversation is built around a journalistic model, there is a big growth in online, open-access journals each with different approaches to peer review. But peer review is impossible to define and reviewing research before it is published can be fraught with problems. This is part of the reason why so many published research findings are false. Alternative…

After decades of cracking, the cracks are appearing in cryptography. infobunny, CC BY By Bill Buchanan, Edinburgh Napier University We have always been been intrigued by keeping secrets and uncovering the secrets of others, whether that’s childhood secret messages, or secrets and codebreaking of national importance. With a film, The Imitation Game, reprising the life of Alan Turing and his role in breaking the Nazi’s Enigma cipher of World War II, how does one codebreak, then and now? It’s all in the cipher Imagine that Bob and Alice wish to secretly communicate, and Eve, who wishes to…