Scientists have copied the natural glue secreted by a tiny sea creature called the sandcastle worm in an effort to develop a long-sought medical adhesive needed to repair bones shattered in battlefield injuries, car crashes and other accidents. They reported on the adhesive here today at the 238th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS). "This synthetic glue is based on comple...

Heavier rainstorms lie in our future. That`s the clear conclusion of a new MIT and Caltech study on the impact that global climate change will have on precipitation patterns. But the increase in extreme downpours is not uniformly spread around the world, the analysis shows. While the pattern is clear and consistent outside of the tropics, climate models give conflicting results within the tropics ...

Antennas for the latest implanted medical devices are being developed by Queen Mary University of London and tested through a unique piece of kit at the UK`s National Physical Laboratory (NPL). In the near future in-body medical devices such as pacemakers will use radio frequency (RF) technology to improve healthcare for patients. A low-powered, two-way wireless communications system linking an in...

By carefully observing and analyzing the pattern of activity in the brain, researchers have found that they can tell what number a person has just seen. They can similarly tell how many dots a person has been presented with, according to a report published online on September 24th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication. These findings confirm the notion that numbers are encoded in the brain ...

University of Michigan scientists have developed a combination drug that promises a safer, more precise way for medics and fellow soldiers in battle situations to give a fallen soldier both morphine and a drug that limits morphine’s dangerous side effects. They use nanotechnology to devise ultra-small polymer particles capable of carrying the drugs into the body. The development of the combi...

The first Swiss satellite in history — extremely small and 100 percent student designed and built — has been successfully launched from the Sriharikota space station in India. Constructed by the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, with many institutional partners, the SwissCube has gone into orbit. Those who worked on it adhered to extremely precise requirements for...

Astronomers have witnessed odd behavior around a young star. Something, perhaps another star or a planet, appears to be pushing a clump of planet-forming material around. The observations, made with NASA`s Spitzer Space Telescope, offer a rare look into the early stages of planet formation. Planets form out of swirling disks of gas and dust. Spitzer observed infrared light coming from one such dis...

The discovery of large quantities of water on the moon will have very significant implications for human space exploration, according to Kingston University space expert Dr Chris Welch. The findings by NASA, which have been hitting the headlines today, were reportedly made after researchers examined data from three separate missions to the moon. Dr Welch, astronautics and space systems expert at K...

The ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) astronomical observatory has taken another step forward — and upwards. One of its state-of-the-art antennas was carried for the first time to the 5000m plateau of Chajnantor, in the Chilean Andes, on the back of a custom-built giant transporter. The antenna, which weighs about 100 tons and has a diameter of 12 metres, was transported up...

After decades of debate and four years of investigation an international body of earth scientists has formally agreed to move the boundary dates for the prehistoric Quaternary age by 800,000 years, reports the Journal of Quaternary Science. The decision has been made by the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), the authority for geological science which has acted to end decades of contro...