London, Jan 1 (ANI): A team led by an Indian-origin researcher has developed Tinkercell-a computer-aided design technology (CAD) that could allow synthetic biologists to redesign artificial life forms much faster and more easily.
Deepak Chandran and colleagues at the University of Washington in Seattle developed Tinkercell to allow biologists to meddle with [...]
London, Dec 15 (ANI): An experimental vaginal gel has failed to prove effective against HIV in human trials.
The anti-HIV gel called PRO 2000 contains a polymer of naphthalene sulphonate designed to physically prevent HIV from binding to cells lining [...]
London, December 14 (ANI): Experts have created a system that learns users’ behaviour patterns to provide them with an enhanced cellphone service.
According to communications engineer Arjen Peddemors, and colleagues at the Technical University of Delft, Netherlands, the idea of predicting “mobility [...]
London, Dec 14 (ANI): Scientists from Lund University in Sweden have made a novel discovery that may help deal with bedbug infestation.
According to lead researcher Camilla Ryne, bedbugs are notoriously undiscerning about who they mount, and [...]
London, December 12 (ANI): The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has released guidelines on the long-awaited “athlete biological passport”, a way to spot cheats by monitoring them for suspicious changes in normal physiology.
According to a report in New Scientist, the passport, which consists of a regularly updated record of blood measurements for each athlete, was [...]
London, December 9 (ANI): Reports indicate that a second wheel may now be broken on NASA’s Spirit rover, dampening hopes for freeing the robot from a sand trap it has been trapped in for seven months on Mars.
Spirit has been struggling to escape from a patch of soft, sandy soil since April. Its three [...]
London, Nov 12 (ANI): Japanese scientists claim eggs donated by young women could be used to repair the damaged eggs of older women, increasing the chances of successful fertilisation.
IVF often fails in older women because there are abnormalities in the outside of their eggs, known as cytoplasm, which surrounds the nucleus.
Researchers at St Mother Hospital [...]
London, November 9 (ANI): A scientist has suggested that the Neanderthals might have gone extinct because of a deadly combination of bad luck and climate change.
According to a report in New Scientist, the scientist in question is evolutionary ecologist Clive Finlayson.
The Neanderthals, a race of cavemen who ruled Europe and Asia, mysteriously vanished between 28,000 [...]
London, November 9 (ANI): Using in-car technology that gives out warnings over reckless driving may help reduce number of teenage deaths on the roads, experts believe.
Safety engineer Oren Musicant at Ben-Gurion University in Israel examined in-vehicle data recorders with teenage drivers over six months.
Staffordshire County Council, UK, had carried out a trial of the [...]
London, November 05 (ANI): People who can’t afford sophisticated cell phones have a reason to smile – a new technology will bring internet-based services to the most basic handsets.
What’s more, the network protocol being built by Umesh Chandra of the Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto, California, will get mobile phones connected to the web [...]
London, Nov 7 (ANI): Sharks from the Pacific Ocean hang out at a place called the ‘white shark cafe’ so that they can to look for “local” mates, concludes a new study.
Great white sharks travel all over the Pacific Ocean to hunt, but they tend to mate with others from the same area, forming genetically [...]
London, Oct 18 (ANI): A week after NASA had hit the moon as part of its LCROSS mission, the first image of the lunar material that erupted as a result has been released.
The image was taken by a spacecraft trailing behind the impactor, whose bird’s-eye view allowed it to look at the material, which had [...]
London, Oct 17 (ANI): Venki Ramakrishnan, the Indian-American molecular biologist, who shared this year’s Chemistry Nobel with two other scientists, celebrated his big day with only a “little drinks party in the lab”.
At first, the 57-year-old Ramakrishnan couldn’t believe he had won the Nobel.
The New Scientist quoted him as saying: “Initially, I thought it was [...]
London, October 15 (ANI): Scientists have build a device that can create an electromagnetic “black hole” that sucks in surrounding light, a method which may lead to an entirely new way of harvesting solar energy to generate electricity.
A theoretical design for a table-top black hole to trap light was proposed earlier this year by Evgenii [...]
London, Oct 14 (ANI): Looking for help from a chimp? Don’t forget to use the word ‘please’ in the request.
According to a new study, captive chimpanzees willingly help others obtain an out-of-reach snack, but only if they beg for it.
In the [...]
London, October 13 (ANI): An inventor has made a desktop fan with no visible blades, which reduces the risks of accidents.
According to a report in New Scientist, the inventor in question is James Dyson.
“Conventional three-bladed fans chop at the air and fire chunks of it at you, like wedges of cheese,” Dyson said. “Plus, they [...]
London, October 13 (ANI): Scientists have reported the discovery of the tiniest dinosaur footprints ever found, which were made by a baby dinosaur as it fled for its life.
The prints were discovered in 2008 during the construction of a reservoir on Changseon Island, located 320 kilometres from the South Korean capital of Seoul.
According to a [...]
London, Oct 12 (ANI): Juggling can significantly improve networking in the brain, say researchers.
The popular trick strengthens brain’s white matter through which messages pass within the nervous system.
Lead researcher Jan Scholz from the University of Oxford gave 24 young men and women training [...]
London, Oct 9 (ANI): Artificial skin covering prosthetics and humanoid robots might resemble real skin to the ‘T’, but when touched the difference is apparent.
John-John Cabibihan at the National University of Singapore and colleagues from Italy, Norway and France, have found that fake skin responds very differently to being touched.
For the study, they subjected silicone [...]
London, Oct 9 (ANI): Pigs might not be able to fly but they do have other talents. The “Mr. Smarty Pant” animal can learn how to interpret an image in the mirror and use it to find hidden food, say scientists.
According to scientists, the ability to use a mirror is a sign of complex cognitive [...]
London, October 5 (ANI): A new study has determined that ‘green roofs’, that is, roofs with a cover of plants, can significantly cut carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.
According to a report in New Scientist, Kristin Getter and colleagues at Michigan State University in East Lansing carried out the study.
“I can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t want a [...]
London, October 5 (ANI): If the results of a new research are anything to go by, carbon nanotubes are able fertilizers that can boost germination in plants.
According to a report in New Scientist, the research was carried out by plant biologist Mariya Khodakovskaya and nanotechnologist Alexandru Biris, both at the University of Arkansas at Little [...]
London, September 24 (ANI): A gene that affects memory and IQ among students has been identified, say researchers.
Chun-Yen Chang, an education researcher at National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei, says that teens with a particular mutation in the COMT gene have been found to score significantly lower on a national placement exam, compared with [...]
London, September 22 (ANI): In a surprising new research, scientists have determined that people living in cities are responsible for far fewer greenhouse-gas emissions than people dwelling in the countryside.
According to a report in New Scientist, the reason for this discrepancy is that city dwellers generally live closer to the places where they work, shop [...]
London, September 20 (ANI): Spreading altruism through social networks can make people across the world kind to one another, says an expert.
Nicholas Christakis, of Harvard Medical School in Boston, has observed in a study that one’s kindness can turn a friend kind to someone else he/she knows.
To demonstrate this, Christakis designed a cooperation game [...]
London, Sept 17 (ANI): The age-old Asian folklore that eating durian, known as the ‘king of fruits’, along with alcohol can kill you, holds some truth, say researchers.
John Maninang and Hiroshi Gemma from the University of Tsukuba, Japan believe that the lethal side effects might [...]
London, Sept 13 (ANI): Two researchers at University of Birmingham, UK claim to have found the key to designing a hit video game.
According to Russell Beale and Matthew Bond, it may just be a matter of social interactions and avoiding bad pricing.
To reach the conclusion, the pair analysed game reviews. Weak storytelling and lacklustre in-game [...]
London, September 11 (ANI): In a new research, palaeontologists have found that the prehistoric Velociraptor used its so-called “killing claws” to cling to prey and climb trees, not for disemboweling its victims.
According to a report in New Scientist, Phil Manning [...]
London, September 9 (ANI): In a new report, a panel of experts have suggested that humans could orbit Mars in the 2020s, provided NASA’s budget is boosted.
According to an article in the New Scientist, at its current funding level, the agency will be unable to leave low-Earth orbit for at least the next two decades, [...]
London, September 7 (ANI): A team of scientists at the University of the West of England (UWE) is planning to make a ‘Plasmobot’, a complete robot made out of a plasmodium slime mould.
Though not famed for their intellect, single-celled organisms have already demonstrated a surprising degree of intelligence.
In recent years, single-celled organisms have been used [...]
