University of Queensland

A fleet of robotic submarines, based at the National Oceanography Centre (NOC), head-quartered in Southampton, have been used to map vulnerable cold-water coral reefs in the deep ocean off southwest England. This data set is being used to inform the management of a new Marine Conservation Zone (MCZ) that protects the only area of deep-sea

Will undoubtedly put China at the top of the automation industry   The world’s industrial robotics industry will get considerably larger in the near future as Taiwan-registered Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (best known as Foxconn) has announced plans to begin building industrial robots. Its initial plans of building one million industrial robots for its

KIT Scientists Develop Method for the Specific Degradation of Laser-written Microstructures 3D printing by direct laser writing enables production of micro-meter-sized structures for many applications, from biomedicine to microelectronics to optical metamaterials. Researchers of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have now developed 3D inks that can be erased selectively. This allows specific degradation and reassembly

Cover of Francis Ford Coppola Paul Tamm points us to a really wonderful interview with filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, which touches on a whole variety of different topics, but a couple of quotes are likely to be interesting to folks around here. For example, he’s asked about copying works of other filmmakers and whether or not

The study reports that the capacitance of the nanocable is at least 10 times greater than what would be predicted with classical electrostatics. Thanks to a little serendipity, researchers at Rice University have created a tiny coaxial cable that is about a thousand times smaller than a human hair and has higher capacitance than previously

A scientist describes his unconventional approach to food safety   A cow’s rumen has an incredibly thick population of microbes, somewhere between 10 billion and 100 billion microbes per milliliter of its fluid. Escherichia coli and Salmonella are two, but they are found in relatively low levels, maybe one out of 10 million cells. For

On the list of dreaded medical tests, a prostate biopsy probably ranks fairly high. The common procedure requires sticking a needle into the prostate gland to remove tissue for assessment. Thousands of men who undergo the uncomfortable procedure, prompted by a positive PSA (prostate-specific antigen) test, ultimately don’t require cancer treatment. Today, scientists report progress

Scientists at ETH Zurich have developed a new method that greatly simplifies the production of large DNA molecules containing many hundreds of genes. With this method, they have built the first genome of a bacterium entirely designed by a computer algorithm. The method has the potential to revolutionise biotechnology. All the genome sequences of organisms

Researchers at Umeå University have identified drugs targeting infections of the parasite Trypanosoma brucei and are thereby well on the way to find a cure against African sleeping sickness. This is the kernel of a thesis, which will be publicly defended on 8 November 2013. African sleeping sickness (Human African trypanosomiasis) is caused by a

It seems that those of us who haven’t bought a glasses-free 3D gadget yet may have the opportunity to try one anyway. Announced at the Virtual Reality Exhibition in Tokyo, Pic3D is a thin sheet of transparent film, which enables a glasses-free 3D effect after being applied to any screen. Global Wave, the Japanese company