Air conditioner 'evolves' in novel study

Played out on a computer over hundreds of generations, a survival-of-the-fittest programming method adapted by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) researchers has spawned, of all things, the design for a ...

Bubbles are the new lenses for nanoscale light beams

Bending light beams to your whim sounds like a job for a wizard or an a complex array of bulky mirrors, lenses and prisms, but a few tiny liquid bubbles may be all that is necessary to open the doors for next-generation, ...

Why do we gesticulate?

If you rely on hand gestures to get your point across, you can thank fish for that! Scientists have found that the evolution of the control of speech and hand movements can be traced back to the same place in the brain, which ...

RoboBees get smart in pollen pursuit

(Phys.org) —When a scout honeybee returns to the hive, she performs a "waggle dance," looping and shaking her rear end in particular patterns to direct her comrades toward the jackpot of nectar and pollen she's found. Her ...

By trying it all, predatory sea slug learns what not to eat

Researchers have found that a type of predatory sea slug that usually isn't picky when it comes to what it eats has more complex cognitive abilities than previously thought, allowing it to learn the warning cues of dangerous ...

Single-cell sequencing

When studying any kind of population—people or cells—averaging is a useful, if flawed, form of measurement. According to the US Census Bureau, the average American household size in 2010 was 2.59. Of course, there are ...

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