Technology

Offshore wind has potential to help the United States meet its growing energy needs, but the U.S. marine renewable energy industry has lagged behind Europe for decades. Recent government subsidies have accelerated renewable energy development in U.S. waters, particularly along the East Coast, but a critical challenge is finding space for a growing number of turbines in an ocean crowded with fishing, marine transportation and recreational boating. To help decision makers better understand trade-offs, scientists need to provide explicit quantitative models of how ocean areas are currently used…

As most of the entire world knows by now, Mother Nature gave us a bit of a surprise this week - a meteor exploded in the atmosphere and shattered windows and injured hundreds of people in the  Chelyabinsk region of Russia. With just the concussive force of the meteorite explosion shattering things, you can imagine what would have happened if a meteorite hit a building - one meteorite did land, thankfully in a lake near Chebarkul rather than on a house. But Russia generates almost 20% of its energy from nuclear power and if it hit a nuclear power plant (let's not get crazy, they have 31…

Lulu, the iOS and Android app for reviewing and objectifying men, had a good first week, reaching the Top 20 in the U.S App. store with over 100,000 downloads.   On Lulu, girls anonymously ridicule and rate men on appearance, humor, manners, ambition, first kiss, sex, and commitment. So if you want to know if that guy you met has a #CleanBathroom or is #CheaperThanABigMac, this is for you.  Like 75 percent of online gamers, it helps to at least pretend to be a woman. If you admit to being a man, or your Facebook login is a man, you get the rejection: "Dude, you're a dude."…

A group has created a new computer system that can quickly reconstruct protolanguages, the rudimentary ancient tongues from which modern languages evolved. And their tool is already 85 percent as accurate as the manual reconstructions performed by expert linguists, they write in PNAS. Protolanguages are reconstructed by grouping words with common meanings from related modern languages, analyzing common features, and then applying sound-change rules and other criteria to derive the common parent. The new tool designed by Bouchard-Côté and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley…

Apple's iPhone success is unquestioned but the perception exceeds the reality. Instead, the more modest expectations of Android devices make people far more satisfied with them.  iPhone 5 only ranks fifth in device satisfaction in a study of 93,825 US mobile users.  The study by mobile research specialists On Device Research, is one of the largest studies of device satisfaction, measuring 320,000 mobile and tablet users across six countries. US mobile users reported a higher satisfaction with their Motorola's Atrix device (8.57) than the much more expensive Apple iPhone 5, which…

figshare, a Digital Science portfolio company, has announced a new partnership with open access publisher Public Library of Science (PLoS) to host the supplemental data for all seven PLoS journals, as well as provide a widget that will enable PLoS users to view data in the articles in the browser alongside the content.   figshare provides a free way for researchers to publish, share and get credit for their research data, hosting videos, datasets, graphs, figures and images. By partnering with figshare, PLoS can host data accompanying their publications, making the data easier to…

If a numerical model simulating 25,000 generations of evolution within computers is to be believed, Cornell University engineering and robotics researchers may have discovered why biological networks tend to be organized as modules – a finding that will lead to a deeper understanding of the evolution of complexity. And they say it will help evolve artificial intelligence. Robot brains with the grace and cunning of animals? What could go wrong? From brains to gene regulatory networks, many biological entities are organized into modules – dense clusters of interconnected parts within a complex…

In a development that could lead to faster and more effective toxicity tests for airborne chemicals, scientists from Rice University and Nano3D Biosciences have used magnetic levitation to grow some of the most realistic lung tissue ever produced in a laboratory. In the new study, researchers combined four types of cells to replicate tissue from the wall of the bronchiole deep inside the lung. In vitro laboratory tests have historically been conducted on 2-D cell cultures grown in flat petri dishes, but scientists have become increasingly aware that cells in flat cultures sometimes behave and…

 Stratasys Ltd., a manufacturer of 3D printers and production systems for prototyping and manufacturing, says that the "magic arms" WREX exoskeleton, designed by Nemours/Alfred l. duPont Hospital for Children, has been nominated for the Designs of the Year 2013 awards by London's Design Museum.  Using a Stratasys Dimension 3D Printer, researchers at the Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Philadelphia were able to help four-year-old Emma Lavelle overcome the limitations of a congenital disorder, allowing her to use her arms for the first time. The "magic arms" device is a…

VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland has developed an automatic ice detection system for cars  that makes use of a new, real-time method of obtaining information on a road's actual slipperiness.   Obviously, such a system helps drivers avoid personal injuries and damage to vehicles in slippery road conditions. Not only are vehicles are warned in advance of a road's actual slipperiness, if the road becomes slippery, other vehicles arriving in the area will also be warned immediately.   Transmission of slippery road warnings to vehicles via text messages has been tested…