Tech
Every year, robots get more and more life-like. Solar-powered bees fly on lithe wings, humanoids stick backflips, and teams of soccer bots strategize how to dribble, pass, and score. And, the more researchers discover about how living creatures move, the more machines can imitate them all the way down to their smallest molecules.
"We have these amazing machines already in our bodies, and they work so well," said Pallav Kosuri. "We just don't know exactly how they work."
ANN ARBOR--Millions of Americans with chronic conditions could save money on the drugs and medical services they need the most, if their health insurance plans decide to take advantage of a new federal rule issued today.
And the idea behind that rule was born at the University of Michigan.
Today, the U.S. Department of the Treasury gave health insurers more flexibility to cover the cost of certain medications and tests for people with common chronic conditions who are enrolled in many high-deductible health plans.
NASA's Aqua satellite provided a visible image of the clouds associated with Post-Tropical Cyclone Barry moving through the mid-Mississippi Valley on July 16, and headed toward the Ohio Valley.
On July 16, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument aboard NASA's Aqua satellite captured a visible look at Barry. Strongest thunderstorms appeared over northwestern Arkansas, western Tennessee and southwestern Kentucky at the time of the image. Barry's remnant clouds were also spreading into southern Indiana.
NASA's Aqua satellite provided a visible image of Tropical Storm Danas as it continued to move north and away from the Philippines.
On July 17 at 12:40 a.m. EDT (0440 UTC), the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument aboard NASA's Aqua satellite captured a visible look at Danas. The strongest thunderstorms appeared southeast of the center of circulation in the MODIS image. Danas was located northeast of Luzon, Philippines, in the Philippine Sea.
Something odd happened in the oceans in the early 20th century. The North Atlantic and Northeast Pacific appeared to warm twice as much as the global average while the Northwest Pacific cooled over several decades.
Atmospheric and oceanic models have had trouble accounting for these differences in temperature changes, leading to a mystery in climate science: why did the oceans warm and cool at such different rates in the early 20th century?
Biologists Laura Carolina Leal and Felipe Passos performed a series of experiments in Brazil's Northeast region - specifically in the interior of Bahia State, where the semiarid Caatinga biome predominates - to determine how plants with extrafloral nectaries interact with ants.
Spaying or neutering large-breed dogs can put them at a higher risk for obesity and, if done when the dog is young, nontraumatic orthopedic injuries, reports a new study based on data from the Morris Animal Foundation Golden Retriever Lifetime Study. The spay/neuter study was published today in the journal PLOS ONE.
Scary movies about dolls that can move, like Anabelle and Chucky, are popular at theaters this summer. Meanwhile, a much less menacing animated doll has chemists talking. Researchers have given a foil "paper doll" the ability to move and do sit-ups with a new material called polymer covalent organic frameworks (polyCOFs). They report their results in ACS Central Science. Watch a video of the material in action here.
Synthetic biologists seek to create new life with forms and functions not seen in nature. Although scientists are a long way from making a completely artificial life form, they have made semi-synthetic organisms that have an expanded genetic code, allowing them to produce never-before-seen proteins. Now, researchers reporting in Journal of the American Chemical Society have optimized a semi-synthetic bacteria to efficiently produce proteins containing unnatural amino acids.
Radiation levels in some regions of the Marshall Islands in the central Pacific, where the United States conducted nuclear tests during the Cold War, are far higher than in areas affected by the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear disasters, according to new research from Columbia University.
WASHINGTON -- Researchers have developed new sensors for measuring acceleration and vibration on trains. The technology could be integrated with artificial intelligence to prevent railway accidents and catastrophic train derailments.
"Each year, train accidents lead to severe injuries and even deaths," said research team leader Hwa-yaw Tam, from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. "Our fiber accelerometers could be used for real-time monitoring of defects in the railway track or the train to pinpoint problems before an accident occurs."
WASHINGTON, D.C., July 17, 2019 -- Imagine powering your devices by walking. With technology recently developed by a group of researchers at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, that possibility might not be far out of reach.
The group describes the technology in Applied Physics Letters, from AIP Publishing. An energy harvester is attached to the wearer's knee and can generate 1.6 microwatts of power while the wearer walks without any increase in effort. The energy is enough to power small electronics like health monitoring equipment and GPS devices.
Robot technicians from Far Eastern Federal University (FEFU) together with colleagues from the Far Eastern Brach of the Russian Academy of Sciences (FEB RAS) developed a command-and-control plugin for intelligent industrial robots. The new software allows the robots to build up high quality 3D computer models of workpieces quickly, precisely, and in the fully automated mode. The related article was published in International Journal of Mechanical Engineering and Robotics Research.
Playing a Pokémon-like card game about ecology and biodiversity can result in broader knowledge of species and a better understanding of ecosystems than traditional teaching methods, like slideshows, according to new research from the University of British Columbia.
Main Findings:
The high-stakes accountability policies used to monitor the quality of Head Start preschool centers may miss important variation in classroom quality within centers, which could lead to incorrect representations of center quality and inaccurate decisions about which programs need to re-compete for their funding.