Humans, like other animals, compare things. We care not only how well off we are, but whether we are better or worse off than others around us, or than we were last year. New research by scientists at the University of Bristol ...
Plants & Animals
May 30, 2013
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If you've ever stood on a hill during a rainstorm, you've probably witnessed landscape evolution, at least on a small scale: rivulets of water streaming down a slope, cutting deeper trenches in the earth when the rain turns ...
Earth Sciences
Apr 10, 2013
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Anyone who has spent more than a few minutes watching some of the more partisan "news" networks lurking in the bowels of cable television is aware that America has grown more polarized in recent years. What's not so certain ...
Social Sciences
Apr 1, 2013
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When a robot is moving one of its limbs through free space, its behavior is well-described by a few simple equations. But as soon as it strikes something solid—when a walking robot's foot hits the ground, or a grasping ...
Robotics
Mar 21, 2013
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A century old mystery as to why, for some animals, it's the father rather than the mother that takes care of their young has been cracked by scientists at the University of Sheffield and University of Bath.
Plants & Animals
Mar 12, 2013
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The last 10 years have seen a flurry of research on an emerging technology called compressed sensing. Compressed sensing does something that seems miraculous: It extracts more information from a signal than the signal would ...
Engineering
Feb 1, 2013
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(Phys.org)—Given that over 20 trillion cubic meters of natural gas, a third of the United States' total reserves, are thought to be trapped in shale, and given the rush to exploit shale oil and gas resources by Australia, ...
General Physics
Jan 4, 2013
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(Phys.org)—Smaller ant colonies tend to live faster, die younger and burn up more energy than their larger counterparts, as do the individual ants that make up those colonies, according to new research that views the colonies ...
Plants & Animals
Dec 19, 2012
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Over the course of decades or even centuries, Earth's landscape can appear relatively static, with mountains and valleys seemingly anchored firmly in place. Viewed over a longer timescale, however—on the order of hundreds ...
Environment
Dec 6, 2012
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At 5:46 p.m. on Sept. 20, Georges Gonthier, principal researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge, sent a brief email to his colleagues at the Microsoft Research-Inria Joint Centre in Paris. It read, in full: "This is really ...
Mathematics
Oct 12, 2012
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