Technology
Miss Georgia tripped in the final round of the 2015 Miss America Pageant and actress Jennifer Lawrence stumbled on her way to accept an Academy Award.
It has happened to all of us. And it happens to robots as well.
Researchers at Georgia Tech have identified a way to teach robots how to fall with grace and without serious damage. The work is important as costly robots become more common in manufacturing alongside humans. The skill becomes especially important, too, as robots are sought for health care or domestic tasks - working near the elderly, injured, children or pets.
Ph.D. graduate…
Women who undergo implant based female sterilization have a significantly heightened risk of reoperation following complications, suggests a large study published in The BMJ this week.
Female sterilization is one of the most common contraception methods worldwide. Laparoscopic sterilization has been the primary method for decades. It is a surgical procedure that clips, stitches or burns the fallopian tubes to prevent pregnancy.
Hysteroscopic sterilization was developed more recently and involves implanting the "Essure" device to block the fallopian tubes. It does not require general…
A course on critical thinking has generated a new proposal to remove sources of bias in research and improve confidence in published studies.
Social science research got a black eye recently when the authors of several studies were shown to have manipulated data. But the more prevalent issue in the social sciences today is not actual fraud, but subtle and usually inadvertent bias that skews the conclusions of studies and often makes them unrepeatable.
In a commentary in the Oct. 8 issue of Nature, Robert MacCoun, a former UC Berkeley professor of law and public policy who is now at Stanford…
What's the best time to tweet, to ensure maximum audience engagement? Researchers at the University of Maryland have demonstrated that an algorithm that takes into account the past activity of each of your followers -- and makes predictions about future tweeting -- can lead to more "retweets" than other commonly used methods, such as posting at peak traffic times.
The internet is full of advice about when to tweet to gain maximum exposure, but the new study subjects marketing folk wisdom to scientific scrutiny.
William Rand, director of the Center for Complexity in Business in UMD's Robert H…
A pioneering surgical technique has restored some hand and arm movement to patients immobilized by spinal cord injuries in the neck, reports a new study.
Like railroad switchmen, the focus is on rerouting passageways; however, instead of trains on a track, the surgeons redirect peripheral nerves in a quadriplegic's arms and hands by connecting healthy nerves to the injured nerves. Essentially, the new nerve network reintroduces conversation between the brain and the muscles that allows patients, once again, to accomplish tasks that foster independence, such as feeding themselves or writing…
Teeth and seashells are among the stronger, more durable things in nature. The secret of these materials lies in their unique fine structure: they are composed of different layers in which numerous micro-platelets are joined together, aligned in identical orientation in each layer.
Mimicking that is not possible but researchers have created a seashell with comparable properties and structural complexity. The team led by André Studart, Professor of Complex Materials at ETH Zurich has developed a new procedure that mimics the natural model almost perfectly. The scientists were able to produce a…
Volkswagen has set aside €6.5 billion to cover the costs of the growing scandal over cheating on emissions tests in the US. Putting a number on the cost further down line will be far harder, however, as it is a crisis which calls into question the ethical credentials of the company and the industry, as well as posing tough questions about the regulators and authorities who were duped.
Although the Volkswagen emissions scandal has caught many by surprise, in fact it has been brewing for a while. It all started when the European wing of the U.S. non-governmental organization International…
For environmental activists who want to use social networks to mobilize the public beyond the retweet, there are three keys to success, according to a paper by scholars ar Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) and INGENIO, a joint center of the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia and CSIC.
Nobody has the precise formula for the success of social media viral campaigns, but there are examples of how they work. By taking as a reference point a Facebook environmental mobilization strategy, the researchers have developed a hypothetical framework to help understand some of the keys to…
Targeted cancer treatments, toxicity sensors and living factories: synthetic biology has the potential to revolutionize science and medicine. But before the technology is ready for real-world applications, more attention needs to be paid to its safety and stability, according to a review article.
Synthetic biology involves engineering microbes like bacteria to program them to behave in certain ways. For example, bacteria can be engineered to glow when they detect certain molecules, and can be turned into tiny factories to produce chemicals.
Synthetic biology has now reached a stage where it's…
Every time you go to the gym to burn off those Dim Sum calories from the night before, your nervous system is subconsciously working against you.
Researchers have found that our nervous systems are remarkably adept in changing the way we move so as to expend the least amount of energy possible.
In other words, humans are wired for laziness.
The findings, which were made by studying the energetic costs of walking, likely apply to most of our movements, the researchers say.
"We found that people readily change the way they walk--including characteristics of their gait that have been…