Curtin University

By using an ordinary green laser pointer, the kind commonly found in offices and college lecture halls, an Israeli research team has developed a new and highly portable Raman spectrometer that can detect extremely minute traces of hazardous chemicals in real time. The new sensor’s compact design makes it an excellent candidate for rapid field

“If women are dissuaded or excluded from even a handful of opportunities, she continued, the loss to science is enormous.” As an undergraduate student in biology, I spent several weeks in Costa Rica one summer with an older graduate student on a research project deep in the cloud forest. It was just the two of

Gas-sensing drones draw NSF backing Rice University researchers, in a collaboration with Baylor College of Medicine and Houston nonprofit Technology For All (TFA), are developing a fleet of autonomous aerial drones that coordinate with each other to detect, track and model the environment and let neighborhoods know of airborne perils that can be especially hazardous following extreme weather events.

Image by Franco Folini via Flickr Scientists have been engineering new genes into plants for a number of years in an effort to expand on naturally occurring medicinal compounds. Now chemists at MIT have gone one step further, using an approach known as metabolic engineering to alter the series of reactions plants use to build

Art advancing science at the nanoscale Like many other scientists, Don Ingber, M.D., Ph.D., the Founding Director of the Wyss Institute, is concerned that non-scientists have become skeptical and even fearful of his field at a time when technology can offer solutions to many of the world’s greatest problems. “I feel that there’s a huge

The future electric-car market will feature a mixture of both all-electric cars and plug-in hybrids At its unveiling at the 2011 Geneva Motor Show earlier this year, Volvo said its V60 plug-in hybrid was “virtually production-ready.” This was an accurate statement as it turns out, with the Swedish automaker announcing that from next year it

Liquid-gated membrane filtration system improves industrial wastewater purification and saves energy Filtering and treating water, both for human consumption and to clean industrial and municipal wastewater, accounts for about 13% of all electricity consumed in the US every year and releases about 290 million metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere annually – roughly equivalent to

Image via Wikipedia Researchers have found a gene that promotes faster-growing and larger roots, which could lead to plants with a robuster ability to sequester excess atmospheric carbon Changes to a single gene in a model organism in plant biology, Arabidopsis thaliana, have been found to promote faster-growing and larger root systems—an application that could help

Two commonly used drugs can repair damage caused by alcohol in utero Two commonly used drugs erased the learning and memory deficits caused by fetal alcohol exposure when the drugs were given after birth, thus potentially identifying a treatment for the disorder, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study. The scientists also newly identified a key

Researchers in the US have taken inspiration from nature to create a robotic wing that can recover from mid-air collisions By examining the wings of birds and bats, the researchers, from Stanford University, have created a mechanism that could allow future flying robots to easily squeeze between obstacles, such as branches of a tree, and