Trinity College Dublin

Wearing a flower brooch that blooms before your eyes sounds like magic. KAIST researchers have made it real with robotic muscles. Researchers have developed an ultrathin, artificial muscle for soft robotics. The advancement, recently reported in the journal Science Robotics, was demonstrated with a robotic blooming flower brooch, dancing robotic butterflies and fluttering tree leaves

The cost of claiming a legitimate income tax refund in Hyderabad, India? 10,000 rupees.   The going rate to get a child who has already passed the entrance requirements into high school in Nairobi, Kenya? 20,000 shillings. The expense of obtaining a driver’s license after having passed the test in Karachi, Pakistan? 3,000 rupees. Such

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

While it is generally not our practice to publish commercial pr articles, we thought that this information would be of general interest. With all of the focus on health, nutrition and obesity issues in schools, this is a very interesting effort (there are others) – we wish them success. Read on . . . New

Promising results provide hope for humans suffering from chronic paralysis Millions of people worldwide are living with chronic spinal cord injuries, with 250,000 to 500,000 new cases each year—most from vehicle crashes or falls. The most severe spinal cord injuries completely paralyze their victims and more than half impair a person’s ability to breathe. Now,

Conservation is winning battles but losing the war.   Embracing new technologies in energy and agriculture might change that. In the conservation and environmental communities, technologies like nuclear power and GMOs are usually spoken of as threats to the environment and biodiversity, or at best as superficial “techno-fixes” that “fail to address the root cause

QIMR Berghofer researchers have discovered a potential new cancer immunotherapy target that involves switching off a regulatory cell to stop tumours growing and spreading. The study findings have been published today in Cancer Discovery, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. Senior researcher and head of QIMR Berghofer’s Cancer Immunoregulation and Immunotherapy Laboratory, Associate

Eggshells are both marvels and afterthoughts. Placed on end, they are as strong as the arches supporting ancient Roman aqueducts. Yet they readily crack in the middle, and once that happens, we discard them without a second thought. But now scientists report that adding tiny shards of eggshell to bioplastic could create a first-of-its-kind biodegradable

New spongelike structure converts solar energy into steam. A new material structure developed at MIT generates steam by soaking up the sun. The structure — a layer of graphite flakes and an underlying carbon foam — is a porous, insulating material structure that floats on water. When sunlight hits the structure’s surface, it creates a

The paper is persuasive because it contains both theoretical arguments “and empirical evidence that it works well,” Baillon said. Crowd wisdom such as what might arise from online voting is popularly assumed to provide better answers than any one person by aggregating multiple perspectives. Democratic methods, however, tend to favor the most popular information, not