Carnegie Mellon researchers to demonstrate autonomous robotthat will seek life in Atacama Desert
...erion, Zoë is expected to travel 2 kilometers each solar day, with a maximum speed of 100 centimeters per second. By contrast, the current Mars rovers travel 0.007 kilometers in one solar day, with a maximum speed of 5 centimeters per second. Zoë can also maneuver itself around large obstacles a...Physics gravity model applicable to disease spread
...ry, although because influenza mutates so rapidly, each year brings a slightly different virus to infect e..., like children, spread the disease by coughing on each other. Two recent outbreaks in 1988 and 2002 have decimated the population in the North Sea. Workin...Method to visualize gene activity may provide insight into normal development & genome function
...han another, because the amount of fluorescence of each color is quantified separately. "When using th...cence, the light is fanned out into a rainbow, and each color is read through a separate channel," explains Bier. "That way if the light is 90 percent blue ...Two-month study of life in mid-Atlantic yields trove of species, new insights & questions
...blind lobster, several questions linger. "Perhaps each line is a burrow with multiple entries, or is it a succession of burrows with just a single opening, but then how and why can these lines be that straight?" ("Fig. 16." Photo credit: MAR-ECO.) Two specimens of the rare Aphyonus gelatinosus, a str...Computer imaging of Archeopteryx skull suggests this dinosaur-bird link could fly
...e scientists to reposition the skull bones next to each other as they likely occurred in life. The repositioning suggested that the creature had a brain about three times larger than crocodiles and other modern reptiles, and of a similar size to many modern birds. "There are living birds that have brains ...NHGRI adds 18 organisms to sequencing pipeline
...mpare it with the genomes of other organisms. With each new genome that we sequence, we move closer to the...nsists of nine mammals. They were selected because each organism represents an important position on the evolutionary tree and therefore will contribute a s...Endangered turtles' trek along ocean currents revealed by satellite
...ch maturity and lay eggs themselves. However each turtle's return is by no means certain. While in open water the turtles have been known to dive as deep as 1,230 metres in search of food, most of the time they do not venture deeper than 250 metres down, leaving them vulnerable to the hooks of longl...Study shows how consensus is attained in a noisy world
...how that a simple majority rule approach, in which each unit -- a person or a cell -- adopts the state of the majority of its neighbors within an intricate communication network, can efficiently lead to global organization. The model is adaptable and robust -- a real-world system capable of responding to ...Outcome for acute lymphoblastic leukemia linked to gene expression patterns
... The researchers identified four groups of genes, each of which had a characteristic pattern of expressio... the levels of expression of thousands of genes in each patient's leukemia cells, and then compared the level of expression (i.e., increased or decreased) o...Protein vaccine fully protects mice from lethal aerosol challenge with ricin toxin
...mately one million pounds of castor beans are used each year in the process of manufacturing castor oil. When inhaled as a small-particle aerosol, ricin produces severe respiratory symptoms followed by respiratory failure within 72 hours. When ingested, ricin can cause severe gastrointestinal symptoms f...Babies with DiGeorge syndrome saved by immune supression, thymus transplant
...ose, only one in 250 babies -- between five and 10 each year in the U.S. -- will have complete DiGeorge sy...unosuppression treatment . "I learn something from each one that will make the treatment better for the next patient," she said. Co-authors on the study inc...Social benefits of wound healing may not make any difference in animals with multiple partners
...en if the mice in a separated pair could still see each other through a screen. Wounds on the non-monogamous mice paired or unpaired healed just as quickly as the wounds on the paired, monogamous mice. "It suggests that the beneficial effects of social housing aren't equivalent for all species,...Study: A little help from friends makes wounds heal faster
...e researchers photographed and measured the wounds each day. Some of the hamsters were confined to small Plexiglas tubes for two hours a day for up to 14 consecutive days. Other studies have shown that such confinement causes stress and also delays wound healing. While the animals couldn't turn ar...Huge market for forest moss raises concerns
...unds of moss is used in, or exported from the U.S. each year, with a final market value that could approach $165 million. Domestic sales, which are largely unknown, are estimated based on the value of export sales which are easier to track, and the known ratio between the amount of moss used locally versu...Wheelchairs biomechanics, prosthetic development
...c navigation tasks and a reliability test in which each wheelchair was configured to wander randomly within an enclosed area populated with obstacles. The SWCS met initial design criteria for safety and performance on a range of wheelchairs. The SWCS can be added to a variety of commercial power wheelchai...Study: Mothers turn fearless when peptide level drops
... solution with no amount of the peptide. Following each injection, which was given once a day for four consecutive days, the researchers returned the mother mice to their pups. Twenty-eight minutes later, the researchers removed the pups and introduced a male intruder. Under normal conditions, f...Lehmann lovegrass won't succumb to fire
... mix. She then assigned one of three treatments to each plot, either burn in the spring, burn in the summer, or leave the plot unburned. Certain species might respond differently depending on the amount of rainfall received before and after the burn, Geiger said. "It really is a species-by-situa...Ants protect plants better when jacked up on nectar
...rpillars on cactus plants and measured how quickly each ant species recruited its fellows to the fresh meat and how many ants it took to vanquish five caterpillars in 30 minutes. Within five to 15 minutes, ant numbers rapidly increased, and ants were dismembering caterpillars. But although all four a...Droughts like 1930s Dust Bowl may have been unexceptional in prehistoric times, new study suggests
...ires occurred during intervening wet periods, with each wet-dry cycle lasting more than a century each. A report on the research will be delivered at a session at 1:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Aug. 4, in Meeting Room D136 of the Oregon Convention Center during the Ecological Society of America's 2004 annual mee......y crayfish that crawled across the rocky bottom in each sampling area. The number of crayfish ranged from ...laborators then compared the number of crayfish in each sampling area to data collected by another UW-Madison group studying the number of fish and aquatic ...