For the first time, Arizona State University researchers have discovered that at least in ants, animals can change their decision-making strategies based on experience. They can also use that experience to weigh different options.
In a study led by Duke researchers, monkeys have learned to control the movement of both arms on an avatar using just their brain activity.
As more businesses find their way into the cloud, few engage in security measures beyond those provided by the associated cloud storage firm, a new report from Georgia Tech notes. Even fewer seek heightened data protection because of concerns that usability and access to remote data would be significantly reduced.
A newly discovered dinosaur, belonging to the same evolutionary branch as the famous Tyrannosaurus rex, was announced today in the open-access scientific journal PLoS ONE and unveiled on exhibit at the Natural History Museum of Utah.
Math video games can enhance students’ motivation to learn, but it may depend on how students play, researchers at New York University and the City University of New York have found in a study of middle-schoolers.
For the first time, UCLA researchers created a a virtual world that allowed them to manipulate a rodent's environment, and found that separate areas of a brain can work together, or be at odds.
For decades, scientists have searched for treatments for myopathies — genetic muscular diseases such as muscular dystrophy and ALS, also called Lou Gehrig’s disease. Now, an interdisciplinary team of researchers from Arizona State and Stanford Universities, and the University of Arizona, has discovered a new avenue to search for treatment possibilities.
Cornell University engineers have taught a robot to work in a mock-supermarket checkout line, modifying a Baxter robot from Rethink Robotics in Boston to “coactively learn” from humans and make adjustments while an action is in progress.
When New York City moved in 2006 to make it easier for transgender people to revise the gender on their birth certificates, the proposal was widely expected to pass. But the anti-discrimination measure failed. An analysis of mainstream news coverage examines why.
There’s good news and there’s bad news. Which do you want to hear first? That depends on whether you are the giver or receiver of bad news, and if the news-giver wants the receiver to act on the information, according to researchers at the University of California, Riverside.
UC San Diego sociologist's analysis of interactions on OkCupid.com finds that race still matters in internet dating but also that “racial boundaries are more fragile than we think.”
A Texas Tech astrophysicist was part of a team of researchers that discovered the first examples of black holes in globular star clusters in our own galaxy, upsetting 40 years of theories against their possible existence.
The Wildlife Conservation Society’s Central Park Zoo is debuting their first-ever snow leopard cubs.
A unique collaboration between a University of California, Riverside sociologist and the Indio Police Department has produced a computer model that predicts, by census block group, where burglaries are likely to occur.
Doom may be averted for the Smith Cloud, a gigantic streamer of hydrogen gas that is on a collision course with the Milky Way Galaxy. Astronomers using the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) and Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) have discovered a magnetic field deep in the cloud’s interior, which may protect it during its meteoric plunge into the disk of our Galaxy.
Researchers at Johns Hopkins say they have found that a gene already implicated in human speech disorders and epilepsy is also needed for vocalizations and synapse formation in mice. The finding, they say, adds to scientific understanding of how language develops, as well as the way synapses — the connections among brain cells that enable us to think — are formed.
Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) and Weill Cornell Medical College of have determined the first atomic-level structure of the tripartite HIV envelope protein—long considered one of the most difficult targets in structural biology and of great value for medical science.
Results of a Johns Hopkins study published today in the journal Diabetes Care found that young and middle-aged women with type 2 diabetes are at much greater risk of coronary artery disease than previously believed.
Only a few genetic changes are needed to spur the evolution of new species—even if the original populations are still in contact and exchanging genes. Once started, however, evolutionary divergence evolves rapidly, ultimately leading to fully genetically isolated species, report scientists from the University of Chicago in the Oct 31 Cell Reports.
Although a significant build-up in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would alter worldwide precipitation patterns, geoengineering would also interfere with rainfall and snowfall. An international study, led by NCAR scientists, finds that “geoengineering” could result in monsoonal rains in North America, East Asia, and other regions dropping by 5-7 percent compared to preindustrial conditions because of less evaporation and reduced plant emissions of water.
Imagine a 1950s horror movie monster—a creeping, gluey tangle of gunk that strangles everything around it. That’s what amyloid plaques are like when they form in body tissues. These gooey protein clumps are associated with many chronic and debilitating disorders, and scientists have made enormous strides in understanding how these structures play roles in disease.
With the help of computerized eye trackers, a new cognitive science study finds that at least 50 percent of people can see the movement of their own hand even in the absence of all light.
Scientists say they’ve produced “the clearest evidence yet” the SARS virus originated in Chinese horseshoe bats and that direct bat-to-human transmission is “plausible.” The 2002 severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) pandemic was one of the most significant public health events in recent history and researchers have been studying the virus to better understand how it is transmitted to prepare for future outbreaks.
Scientists have confirmed that humpback whales in the southern Gulf of Maine are spending more feeding time on the ocean floor than in any of their known feeding behaviors, putting them at risk for entanglement in bottom-set fishing gear like lobster traps.
Corporate executives are astonishingly overconfident in their ability to forecast the stock market, a new study shows.
A species of humpback dolphin previously unknown to science is swimming in the waters off northern Australia, according to a team of researchers working for the Wildlife Conservation Society, the American Museum of Natural History, and numerous other groups that contributed to the study.
Scientists have found a way to use coastal redwood trees as a window into historic climate, using oxygen and carbon atoms in the wood to detect fog and rainfall in previous seasons.
Meteorite bombardment left large craters that contained water and chemical building blocks for life, which ultimately led to the first organisms.
A new study by UNL psychologists Sarah Gervais and Mike Dodd used eye-tracking technology to map the visual behavior of men and women as they looked at images of women with different body types.
High blood-sugar levels, such as those linked with Type 2 diabetes, make beta amyloid protein associated with Alzheimer’s disease dramatically more toxic to cells lining blood vessels in the brain, according to a new Tulane University study published in latest issue of the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease.
Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have identified changes in the brains of children growing up in poverty. Those changes can lead to lifelong problems like depression, learning difficulties and limitations in the ability to cope with stress. But the study showed that the extent of those changes was influenced strongly by whether parents were attentive and nurturing.
The language a child speaks affects the rate at which they learn number words, and hearing number words in natural conversation – not just in counting routines – is a critical part of learning the meaning of numbers.
In a pair of landmark studies that exploit the genetic sequencing of the “missing link” cold virus, rhinovirus C, scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have constructed a three-dimensional model of the pathogen that shows why there is no cure yet for the common cold.
Gas and oil deposits in shale have no place to hide from an Oak Ridge National Laboratory technique that provides an inside look at pores and reveals structural information potentially vital to the nation’s energy needs.
Some of the most common vision disorders take their toll by damaging blood vessels near the retina. But it’s difficult for eye care professionals and researchers to see these vessels with standard techniques. NIH’s National Eye Institute is supporting the development of new methods to get deeper, more detailed views of the retinal vasculature.
Imagine significantly reducing a persistent migraine or fibromyalgia by a visit to a doctor who delivers low doses of electricity to the brain
Sandpipers exhibit different feeding behaviour depending on position in group
Body temperature follows a 24-hour rhythm, peaking during the day, low at night. The benefit might be the conservation of energy while sleeping. It is also critical to be able to adapt to changes in ambient temperature regardless of the time of day. A new mouse study shows how body temperature rhythms are synchronized while maintaining the ability to adapt to changes in environmental temperature day or night.
Dendrites, parts of neurons, were once thought to be passive wiring in the brain. But now researchers at the University of North Carolina have shown that dendrites actively process information, multiplying the brain’s computing power. Published in the journal Nature, the finding could help researchers better understand neurological disorders.
Evolutionary biologist W.D. Hamilton predicted that organisms ought to evolve the ability to discriminate degrees of kinship so as to refine their ability to direct help to individuals with whom they shared the most genes. But two WUSTL biologists point out that there seem to be many cases where “a veil of ignorance” prevents organisms from gaining this kind of information, forcing them to consider a situation from the perspective of all members of their group instead of solely from their own perspective or that of their close kin.
Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope have taken a new look at the Boomerang Nebula, the so-called "coldest place in the Universe" to learn more about its frigid properties and determine its true shape, which has an eerily ghost-like appearance.
In an ambitious collaborative program, called The Frontier Fields, NASA's Great Observatories are teaming up to look deeper into the universe than ever before. With a boost from natural "zoom lenses" found in space, they should be able to uncover galaxies that are as much as 100 times fainter than what the Hubble, Spitzer, and Chandra space telescopes can typically see. Join several members of the Frontier Fields collaboration during the live Hubble Hangout event at 4:00pm (EDT) on Thursday, October 24 to discuss more on what's to come from these observations, how the clusters were chosen, and what we hope to learn from them.
Our ability to hear relies on hair cells, sensory receptors that mechanically amplify low-level sound that enters the inner ear through a transduction channel. A new study in The Journal of General Physiology could help lead to a definitive identification of this mystery channel.
For the first time ever, scientists have documented a widespread extinction of bees that occurred 65 million years ago, concurrent with the massive event that wiped out land dinosaurs and many flowering plants. Their findings, published this week in the journal PLOS ONE, could shed light on the current decline in bee species.
Researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have, for the first time, taken chimpanzee and bonobo skin cells and turned them into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), a type of cell that has the ability to form any other cell or tissue in the body.
Texas A&M University and the University of Texas at Austin may be former football rivals, but the Lone Star State’s two research giants have teamed up to detect the most distant spectroscopically confirmed galaxy ever found — one created within 700 million years after the Big Bang.
Psychology researchers find people with similar personality types are so likely to cluster in certain areas of the United States.
Solar cells that produce electricity 24/7. Cell phones with built-in power cells that recharge in seconds and work for weeks between charges: These are just two of the possibilities raised by a novel supercapacitor design invented by material scientists at Vanderbilt University.
Effective classroom arts integration can reduce or eliminate educational achievement gaps for economically disadvantaged students, according to a Mississippi State University research report.
People who have had what they believe to be supernatural experiences are more likely to be “religious givers,” with their behavior based on cost-benefit principles that work in other transactions — whether that be through Amazon.com or an auto repair shop, according to a Baylor University study.
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