http://phys.org/ en-us Phys.org internet news portal provides the latest news on science including: Physics, Nanotechnology, Life Sciences, Space Science, Earth Science, Environment, Health and Medicine. (Phys.org)—A new study by a team of chemists in Greece has added credence to a theory that suggests that humans differentiate smells by sensing molecular vibrations, rather than through simple binding to receptors. In their paper published in the journal PLoS ONE, the researchers found that deuterating a compound with more hydrogen atoms than had been tested in previous research, resulted in test subjects being able to distinguish between two nearly identical molecules with two distinct vibration frequencies. http://phys.org/news278664286.html Chemistry Tue, 29 Jan 2013 06:45:40 EST news278664286 One of the most difficult problems in the field of genomics is assembling relatively short "reads" of DNA into complete chromosomes. In a new paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences an interdisciplinary group of genome and computer scientists has solved this problem, creating an algorithm that can rapidly create "virtual chromosomes" with no prior information about how the genome is organized. http://phys.org/news277038384.html Biology Thu, 10 Jan 2013 11:06:50 EST news277038384 Day after day, legions of microorganisms work to produce energy from waste in biogas plants. Researchers from Bielefeld University's Center for Biotechnology (CeBiTec) are taking a close look to find out which microbes do the best job. They are analysing the entire genetic information of the microbial communities in selected biogas plants up and down Germany. From the beginning of 2013, the Californian Joint Genome Institute will undertake the sequencing required. The biocomputational analysis will be performed at CeBiTec. Not an easy task, since the data will be supplied in billions of fragments stemming in turn from hundreds of organisms. Piecing together this huge jigsaw puzzle will be painstaking work. http://phys.org/news275309786.html Biology Fri, 21 Dec 2012 10:56:32 EST news275309786 (Phys.org)—English majors might warm to the question of what they want to be when they graduate. Author? OK. Writer? Fine. Master Compiler? Hmm. "Master Compiler" is not a familiar career path to English majors, but it might describe the unique work of INSEAD professor Philip M. Parker. He has a patented system for algorithmically compiling data into book form. He has brought the automatically generated books into the mainstream with Amazon listing over 100,000 books attributed to Parker, and over 700,000 works listed for his company, ICON Group International. According to reports, a separate entity, EdgeMaven Media, in addition, provides applications for businesses to create their own computer made content. The organizations pay for this service to compile data for their reports. http://phys.org/news274950107.html Technology Mon, 17 Dec 2012 07:02:12 EST news274950107 For anyone who has ever struggled while attempting to solve a Sudoku puzzle, University of Notre Dame researcher Zoltan Toroczkai and Notre Dame postdoctoral researcher Maria Ercsey-Ravaz are riding to the rescue. They can not only explain why some Sudoku puzzles are harder than others, they have also developed a mathematical algorithm that solves Sudoku puzzles very quickly, without any guessing or backtracking. http://phys.org/news269188671.html Technology Thu, 11 Oct 2012 15:38:00 EST news269188671 Imposing minimal capital levels for banks is like attempting to solve a complex jigsaw puzzle with a poorly fitting piece that could lead to even greater chaos. http://phys.org/news263730770.html Other Sciences Thu, 09 Aug 2012 11:32:58 EST news263730770 An international team of mathematicians has proposed a new solution to understanding a biological puzzle that has confounded molecular biologists. http://phys.org/news262958470.html Other Sciences Tue, 31 Jul 2012 13:01:26 EST news262958470 (Phys.org) -- A Cornell scientist has come up with an algorithm that can sift through 10,000 pieces of a jigsaw in 24 hours to complete the puzzle. Andrew Gallagher at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, wrote the algorithm while working at Eastman Kodak, where he was developing image enhancement algorithms for digital photofinishing. Gallagher, who is with Cornell’s Advanced Multimedia Processing (AMP) Lab, was also among the contestants trying for the DARPA shredded-document challenge last year. http://phys.org/news259133120.html Technology Sun, 17 Jun 2012 07:00:01 EST news259133120 (Phys.org) -- Visualize trying to finish a jigsaw puzzle where each individual piece keeps changing shape. If that sounds like an impossible task, imagine the vexing job scientists have faced in computer modeling of interactions between tens of thousands of proteins that are fundamental to biology. http://phys.org/news258356141.html Biology Fri, 08 Jun 2012 06:35:49 EST news258356141 Scientists believe they've pinpointed the last crucial piece of the 80-year-old puzzle of how plants "know" when to flower. http://phys.org/news257185170.html Biology Fri, 25 May 2012 17:19:37 EST news257185170 The Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment, a multinational collaboration operating in the south of China, today reported the first results of its search for the last, most elusive piece of a long-standing puzzle: how is it that neutrinos can appear to vanish as they travel? The surprising answer opens a gateway to a new understanding of fundamental physics and may eventually solve the riddle of why there is far more ordinary matter than antimatter in the universe today. http://phys.org/news250359681.html Physics Thu, 08 Mar 2012 01:00:01 EST news250359681 A team of researchers has found a key to the habitat puzzle for improving long-term survival of the endangered Florida Scrub-Jay. http://phys.org/news249125364.html Biology Wed, 22 Feb 2012 09:29:32 EST news249125364 (PhysOrg.com) -- Over the past several years, Sudoku, as most people know, has become wildly popular. Where once mainstream newspapers carried only crossword puzzles, they now also carry a Sudoku puzzle as well. But along with that popularity, has come increased scrutiny and competition between people to see if certain properties of the puzzle can be found. For example, in any given Sudoku puzzle, how many clues must be given in order to have just one unique solution to the problem? Most Sudoku enthusiasts will answer 17, because nobody has ever been able to find one with 16 or less; which is fine, except that people as a general rule like some sort of proof of such things. Thus, it should not come as much of a surprise to anyone that a team of mathematicians have not only set out to prove what everyone thinks they know, but have succeeded in their endeavor. http://phys.org/news245077734.html Technology Fri, 06 Jan 2012 13:09:18 EST news245077734 So you just got an iPad for Christmas. You already have all the essentials loaded - Facebook, Twitter, iBooks, whatever news app you prefer. http://phys.org/news244374504.html Technology Thu, 29 Dec 2011 10:00:06 EST news244374504 Scientists have solved the mystery of how tiny marine crustaceans called copepods regulate the rhythms of their life-cycle. http://phys.org/news243152709.html Biology Thu, 15 Dec 2011 06:25:38 EST news243152709 Almost 9,000 teams registered to participate in DARPA's Shredder Challenge. Thirty-three days after the challenge was announced, one small San Francisco-based team correctly reconstructed each of the five challenge documents and solved their associated puzzles. The ‘All Your Shreds Are Belong to U.S.’ team, which won the $50,000 prize, used custom-coded, computer-vision algorithms to suggest fragment pairings to human assemblers for verification. In total, the winning team spent nearly 600 man-hours developing algorithms and piecing together documents that were shredded into more than 10,000 pieces. http://phys.org/news242297243.html Technology Mon, 05 Dec 2011 08:47:37 EST news242297243 (PhysOrg.com) -- With only days left until the December 4 Shredder Challenge deadline, DARPA is still asking the sharpest-minded computer scientists and simply the curious if anyone among them has the skills to reconstruct shredded documents and solve DARPA’s five puzzles? There are five separate puzzles in which the number of documents, the document subject matter and the method of shredding are varied and present increasing difficulty. http://phys.org/news241205575.html Technology Tue, 22 Nov 2011 17:33:10 EST news241205575 (PhysOrg.com) -- Every few years the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) holds a public competition to stretch the outer limits of what technology can do. Two years ago they dispersed 10 large, red weather balloons at undisclosed locations across the U.S. The celebrated 2009 DARPA Network Challenge to find the balloons was solved in just nine hours by a team from MIT. Now, Manuel Cebrian, a member of that winning team, is aiming for a repeat win – only this time, the challenge is exponentially harder. http://phys.org/news240736118.html Technology Thu, 17 Nov 2011 07:09:57 EST news240736118 University of Toronto materials science and engineering (MSE) researchers have demonstrated for the first time the key mechanism behind how energy levels align in a critical group of advanced materials. This discovery is a significant breakthrough in the development of sustainable technologies such as dye-sensitized solar cells and organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs). http://phys.org/news239805939.html Nanotechnology Sun, 06 Nov 2011 13:10:04 EST news239805939 By destabilizing superconductivity with a strong magnetic field, the electrons of a "high temperature" superconductor align into linear filaments. This phenomenon has been demonstrated by a team of researchers at the CNRS Laboratoire National des Champs Magnetiques Intenses. Published in Nature on the 8 September 2011, these results add a new piece to the puzzle that condensed-matter physicists have been trying to put together for nearly twenty-five years. http://phys.org/news235125217.html Physics Tue, 13 Sep 2011 09:34:10 EST news235125217 Google paid tribute on Wednesday to 17th century French mathematician Pierre de Fermat, transforming its celebrated homepage logo into a blackboard featuring "Fermat's Last Theorem." http://phys.org/news232814569.html Technology Wed, 17 Aug 2011 15:43:12 EST news232814569 (AP) -- It may have been the final big official event of the last space shuttle mission, but a welcome-home and thank-you party for the crew of Atlantis Friday wasn't dwelling on any sad ending. http://phys.org/news230612848.html Space & Earth Sat, 23 Jul 2011 04:08:03 EST news230612848 It is a mathematical puzzle which has vexed academics and travelling salesmen alike, but new research from Queen Mary, University of London's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, reveals how bumblebees effectively plan their route between the most rewarding flowers while travelling the shortest distances. http://phys.org/news228539063.html Biology Wed, 29 Jun 2011 04:04:39 EST news228539063 Quantum key distribution (QKD) is an advanced tool for secure computer-based interactions, providing confidential communication between two remote parties by enabling them to construct a shared secret key during the course of their conversation. http://phys.org/news227270551.html Physics Tue, 14 Jun 2011 11:42:45 EST news227270551 Google launched a daily trivia game on Monday which involves scouring the Internet search engine for the answers to questions. http://phys.org/news221746238.html Technology Mon, 11 Apr 2011 13:50:04 EST news221746238 An IBM computer displayed a few quirks but played to a draw on the opening day of a man vs. machine showdown with two human champions of the popular US television game show Jeopardy!. http://phys.org/news216969163.html Technology Tue, 15 Feb 2011 05:13:16 EST news216969163 (PhysOrg.com) -- Two UT Dallas computer scientists have made progress on a nearly 4-decade-old mathematical puzzle, producing a proof that renowned Stanford computer scientist Don Knuth called "amazing" in his communication back to them. http://phys.org/news207466079.html Other Sciences Thu, 28 Oct 2010 06:28:53 EST news207466079 (PhysOrg.com) -- Completing jigsaw puzzles is a challenging and popular hobby, but now scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the U.S. and Tel Aviv University in Israel have for the first time developed a probabilistic graphical model to solve a jigsaw puzzle consisting of 400 square pieces. http://phys.org/news193908598.html Technology Mon, 24 May 2010 08:32:56 EST news193908598 (PhysOrg.com) -- A new analysis of number randomness in Sudoku matrices could lead to the development of more difficult and multi-dimensional Sudoku puzzles. In a recent study, mathematicians have found that the way that numbers are arranged in Sudoku puzzles is even more random than the number arrangements in randomly-generated matrices. The counter-intuitive discovery may enable researchers to develop algorithms that generate Sudoku matrices with fewer clues, making them more difficult to solve. http://phys.org/news185217892.html Other Sciences Sat, 13 Feb 2010 13:30:58 EST news185217892 (PhysOrg.com) -- A new study pitting academic expertise against a computer in recreating a 425 million-year old jigsaw puzzle has discovered that there is no substitute for wisdom born out of experience. http://phys.org/news177583145.html Other Sciences Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:40:22 EST news177583145