Interdisciplinary Research

How do they do it? One of the best-kept secrets in the natural world may be about to be revealed.

Bats, porpoises and dolphins have biological sonar technology that is vastly superior to anything that man has yet devised. They use sonar to distinguish resolution and identify objects and their material characteristics for objects that are, to all extents and purposes, bewilderingly similar.

Now, researchers in the University of Leicester Department of Geology are playing

Robots that ’feel’ objects and their texture could soon become a reality thanks to the innovative and interdisciplinary research of the AMouse, or artificial mouse, project.

But even more important, perhaps, are the lessons researchers learned about robot design and artificial intelligence. The project funded by the Future and Emerging Technologies initiative of the IST programme even developed new insights into biological brain function.

Researchers from Italy, Ge

Copying the ideas of others is usually frowned upon, but when it comes to the work of Mother Nature, scientists are finding they can use nature as a template.

An interdisciplinary group of scientists and engineers at the Georgia Institute of Technology recently formed the Center for Biologically Inspired Design (CBID) with the goal of capitalizing on the rich source of design solutions present in biological processes. The researchers believe nature can inspire design and en

Three new Research Units, located in Bochum, Constance and Berlin, were approved for funding by the Joint Committee of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) at its meeting on 20 October 2005. The DFG’s Research Units programme promotes interdisciplinary cooperation between outstanding scientists and researchers working on a specific research topic. The programme, which provides funding for a period of six years, is also intended to contribute to the establishment of n

Marriage of theory, experiment is first for multi-domain protein folding

In unprecedented new research, scientists at Rice University have combined theory and experiment for the first time to both predict theoretically and verify experimentally the protein-folding dynamics of a large, complex protein. The interdisciplinary research appears this week in two back-to-back papers in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Researchers have successfully combined co

The University of Manchester has been awarded £1.7m to build a new instrument which will for the first time combine ToF-SIMS and infrared spectroscopy opening up new possibilities in the study biological, organic and inorganic materials.

The capabilities of the instrument, which is expected to be built within two years, will be tested on materials such as prostate cancer tissue and environmental particulate pollutants.

The new instrument will enable surface and bulk analys