Author Archives: Keith Brown

Team unearths what may be secret weapon against antibiotic resistance

A fungus living in the soils of Nova Scotia could offer new hope in the pressing battle against drug-resistant germs that kill tens of thousands of people every year, including one considered a serious global threat. via Team unearths what … Continue reading

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Hazing: How to hide in nearly plain sight | Student Science

A new invisibility cloak can hide objects in semi-plain sight — sometimes. Unlike earlier cloaking devices, this one can conceal things from light of any color and coming from any direction. But that flexibility comes at a price: This cloak … Continue reading

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3quarksdaily: Philosophy is a Bunch of Empty Ideas: Interview with Peter Unger

Philosophy: you either get it or you don’t. The field has its passionate defenders, but according to its critics, philosophy is irrelevant, unproductive, and right at the height of the ivory towers. And now, the philosophy-bashing camp can count a … Continue reading

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Thirst for water moves and shakes California | Student Science

California’s thirst for water is creating unrest. During the dry season, tiny earthquakes rattle the state. And its mountains have begun creeping higher, bit by bit. Scientists have just linked the two phenomena to the heavy pumping of water from … Continue reading

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Digital displays get flexible | Student Science

Wrap-around smartphones and roll-up computer tablets could soon be coming to a store near you. A British electronics firm has created a plastic transistor. That could make possible a host of devices with flexible electronic displays. To illustrate the possibilities, … Continue reading

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The fuel cell for home – Research News June 2014 – Topic 2

It converts chemical energy directly into electrical energy. Still, there hadn’t been a market breakthrough for the fuel cell. The systems were too complex. Now, Fraunhofer and Vaillant have developed a simple device for home use. via The fuel cell … Continue reading

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Modernising Research Monitoring in Europe | Center for the Science of Science & Innovation Policy

The tracking of the use of research has become central to the measurement of research impact.  While historically this tracking has meant using citations to published papers, the results are old, biased, and inaccessible – and stakeholders need current data … Continue reading

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SERIOUS WONDER | The Future of Technology Isn’t Just a Rich Man’s Game – SERIOUS WONDER

I get that many believe that the amazing technologies of tomorrow will only be available to the rich and powerful, while the poor and working class suffer with nothing, but what I can’t comprehend anymore is why they believe that … Continue reading

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Message found in a gravity wave : Article : Nature Physics

Nature Physics offers a unique mix of news and reviews alongside top-quality research papers. Published monthly, in print and online, the journal reflects the entire spectrum of physics, pure and applied. Message found in a gravity wave : Article : … Continue reading

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Soon, decayed tooth may repair itself – The Times of India

British scientists have discovered a technique which can make a decayed tooth repair itself. The technique, developed at King’s College, London, effectively reverses decay by using electrical currents to boost the tooth’s natural repair process. Soon, decayed tooth may repair … Continue reading

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The Science of Storytelling: Why Telling a Story is the Most Powerful Way to Activate Our Brains

A good story can make or break a presentation, article, or conversation. But why is that? When Buffer co-founder Leo Widrich started to market his product through stories instead of benefits and bullet points, sign-ups went through the roof. Here … Continue reading

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Astronomers Find a New Type of Planet: The “Mega-Earth” | www.cfa.harvard.edu/

Astronomers announced today that they have discovered a new type of planet – a rocky world weighing 17 times as much as Earth. Theorists believed such a world couldn’t form because anything so hefty would grab hydrogen gas as it … Continue reading

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Spiders know the meaning of web music | University of Oxford

Spider silk transmits vibrations across a wide range of frequencies so that, when plucked like a guitar string, its sound carries information about prey, mates, and even the structural integrity of a web.The discovery was made by researchers from the … Continue reading

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Swarm and Fuzzy | Newsweek

When the first human colonists land on Mars several decades from now, their habitat will already be waiting. They may not even have to don a space suit, instead simply walking down the gangplank in their civvies into a warm, … Continue reading

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Transistors that wrap around tissues and morph with them | KurzweilAI

Electronic devices that become soft when implanted inside the body and can deploy to grip 3-D objects, such as large tissues, nerves and blood vessels have been created by researchers from The University of Texas at Dallas and the University … Continue reading

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Using Brain Research to Design Better eLearning Courses: 7 Tips for Success

The brain is constantly on the lookout for ways to improve by obtaining new knowledge and skills, even before birth. Unfortunately, retaining information can be challenging, simply because instructors and course designers do not always use methods that facilitate remembering. … Continue reading

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Confirmed: An Asteroid Killed the Dinosaurs

Scientists have unearth credible evidence to confirm a large asteroid was responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs over 66 million years ago, it has been announced. This particular extinction event, which paved the way for the evolution of our … Continue reading

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Matter of Mind

A new way of thinking about consciousness is sweeping through science like wildfire. Now physicists are using it to formulate the problem of consciousness in concrete mathematical terms for the first time Continue reading

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Synthetic biology gets reborn as an aesthetic dream

SYNTHETIC biology is not like other sciences. At its first big conference, held just 10 years ago at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the startling initial premise was that life is simply too complicated for biotechnologists to easily modify and that it would be better if engineers rebuilt life from scratch so the created organisms did exactly what was required.

The youthful enthusiasm that powered the field, and brought together engineers, biologists, computer scientists, physicists and biohackers, persists today. There have been a few major achievements, most notably last month’s creation of a computer-designed yeast chromosome. And before that, the creation of the first synthetic cell. Continue reading

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Finding Life After Academia — and Not Feeling Bad About It – NYTimes.com

According to a 2011 National Science Foundation survey, 35 percent of doctorate recipients — and 43 percent of those in the humanities — had no commitment for employment at the time of completion. Fewer than half of Ph.D.’s are expected … Continue reading

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Butterfly Wings Inspire Better Sensors

Imitating nature is not a new idea. When the GE team put Morpho wings under a powerful microscope, they saw a layer of tiny scales just tens of micrometers across. In turn, each of the scales had arrays of ridges … Continue reading

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Artificial intelligence ‘will take the place of humans within five years’ – Telegraph

Mr Aksenov, now 21 years old, founded technology company London Brand Management in 2011. The company provides an AI service for big brands who want to outsource customer or staff interactions to computers. Customers send questions in to LBM’s system … Continue reading

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An (Im)Modest Proposal – The UK Evidence Information Service | Pasco Phronesis

Three U.K. universities are doing something I doubt their U.S. counterparts have the resources (or the willingness to risk) to duplicate.  They have started a process for establishing an Evidence Information Service (EIS) to, as they put it, help put … Continue reading

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Human evolution: Fifty years after Homo habilis : Nature News & Comment

Half a century ago, the British–Kenyan palaeoanthropologist Louis Leakey and his colleagues made a controversial proposal: a collection of fossils from the Great Rift Valley in Tanzania belonged to a new species within our own genus1. The announcement of Homo … Continue reading

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Brace for impacts : Nature News & Comment

When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its previous report in 2007, some scientists and many environmentalists were still loath to talk about adapting to climate change. The policy focus was squarely on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, and even … Continue reading

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