Technology

The top prize in the annual Purdue Student Soybean Product Innovation Contest went to Carmen Valverde-Paniagua of Chihuahua, Mexico, a senior majoring in mechanical engineering, Nicole Raley Devlin of Rockville, Md., a doctoral student in chemical engineering, and Yanssen Tandy of Jarkarta, Indonesia, a senior student in chemical engineering (team name S3D Innovations) for their invention of Filasoy, a next generation 3D printing material.  Filasoy replaces petroleum-based plastic with a low-energy, low-temperature, renewable and recyclable filament. It retains similar properties found…

If we describe the feeling of someone drilling an icicle into their temple, throwing up, and light and sound being unbearable, migraine sufferers know just what we mean. Social media can't make it go away but it gives people a way to share their agony with sympathetic voice. Tweetment - cathartic sharing of physical pain and emotional pain - is all the rage. "As technology and language evolve, so does the way we share our suffering," said principal investigator Alexandre DaSilva, assistant professor and director of the Headache and Orofacial Pain Effort at University of Michigan School of…

Despite extensive cultivation and testing of GM foods, questions related to whether genetic manipulation causes changes in food quality and composition or if genetically modified foods are somehow less nutritious than their non-GM counterparts linger in the minds of some consumers.  In research led by Owen Hoekenga, a Cornell University adjunct assistant professor, scientists extracted roughly 1,000 biochemicals, or "metabolites," from the fruit of tomatoes. These tomatoes had been genetically engineered to delay fruit ripening, a common technique to help keep fruits fresher longer. The…

Artificial intelligence researchers in Washington State University's School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science have developed technology that gives a computer the ability to give advice and teach skills to another computer in a way that mimics how a real teacher and student might interact. Artificial Intelligence Professor  Matthew E. Taylor says the agents – virtual robots – act like true student and teacher pairs: student agents struggled to learn Pac-Man and a version of the StarCraft video game but the student agent learned the games and, in fact, surpassed the teacher.…

When the government that controls funding and therefore what is researched mandates where results have to be published, people taking the money have to comply. Thus it makes sense that clinical trial results as mandated by government may be different than trials results as mandated by various journals Clinical trials, most of which are funded by industry and required to be so by government regulations, are reported different in journals and on the government website ClinicalTrials.gov, which requires data for specific categories that journals do not. An Oregon Health&Science…

University scholars don't use social media to circulate scientific findings and engage their tech-savvy students, according to Michigan State University scholars. Social media is widely used in fields such as journalism and business – not just to push a product but also to engage in open dialogue with readers and clients – but has failed to take hold in academia's so-called ivory tower, even though the taxpayers who fund the research and want increased access to it clamor for insight and context from the experts. Calls for open access aren't going to be heard if academics don't have interest…

In 2007, members of the Haystack Group in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory released a set of Web development tools called Exhibit, which lets novices quickly put together interactive data visualizations, such as maps with sortable data embedded in them, sortable tables that automatically pull in updated data from other sites, and sortable displays of linked thumbnail images. Next month, Haystack members will present findings at the Association for Computing Machinery's Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems on the ways in which Exhibit has been used —…

Last week, the L.A. Times was able to post an article about an earthquake 3 minutes after it happened. No human could write that fast. And no human did. Instead, the story was generated by a computer algorithm called Quakebot, co-created by Northwestern University Professor of Computer Science Dr. Kristian Hammond and programmer Ken Schwencke. All it needed was statistics and clichés. It seems a robo-reporter can write about earthquakes as well as anyone and Schwenke filed the report and proved it. It's meant to be supplemental, Schwenke told Will Oremust at Slate but, come on, who believes…

Tree rings don't lie but if you trust temperature readings before 1980, you are not using a rational approach to science. There are too many cases where the official reader is a thermometer of unknown quality or a television report that used what a farmer who called in from his house said. if you can't trust old thermometers, can you trust old paintings?   A paper in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics used the colors of sunsets painted by famous artists to estimate pollution levels in the Earth's past atmosphere. They found that the paintings reveal that ash and gas released during…

Neuroimages are playing a growing role in biomedical research, medicine, and courtrooms. Unfortunately, that often means they are used to bolster weak observational studies and imply correlation and causation. The people most likely to commit scientific sins with brain imaging, psychologists and neuroscientists, are least likely to acknowledge their acquisitions parameters and many other things that scientists know influence data and conclusions. Brain scans are portrayed as science but they are little help at answering complex questions such as: 'What is depression?' or 'Is a defendant lying…