03/02/2012

Making the worms turn

To biophysicist Aravinthan Samuel, the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans provides a pathway to understanding the brain and nervous system, first of the worm, then of higher animals, and even, perhaps, of humans.

Economizing chemistry, atom by atom

In chemistry, downsizing can have positive attributes. Reducing the number of steps and reagents in synthetic reactions, for example, enables chemists to boost their productivity while reducing their environmental footprint. ...

Manipulating the texture of magnetism

Knowing how to control the combined magnetic properties of interacting electrons will provide the basis to develop an important tool for advancing spintronics: a technology that aims to harness these properties for computation ...

A 'natural' solution for transportation

As the United States transitions away from a primarily petroleum-based transportation industry, a number of different alternative fuel sources—ethanol, biodiesel, electricity and hydrogen—have each shown their own ...

As strong as an insect's shell

Harvard researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have come up with a tough, low-cost, biodegradable material inspired by insects’ hard outer shells. The material’s inventors say it ...

Judder-free videos on the smartphone

Overloaded cellular networks can get annoying – especially when you want to watch a video on your smartphone. An optimised Radio Resource Manager will soon be able to help network operators accommodate heavy network ...

VIIRS eastern hemisphere image: Behind the scenes

(PhysOrg.com) -- The Suomi NPP satellite is in a polar orbit around Earth at an altitude of 512 miles (about 824 kilometers), but the perspective of the new Eastern hemisphere 'Blue Marble' is from 7,918 miles (about 12,743 ...

Genetic information migrates from plant to plant

Plant scientists were confounded by the fact that the DNA extracted from the plants’ green chloroplasts sometimes showed the greatest similarities when related species grew in the same area. They tried to explain this ...

page 4 from 7