Interdisciplinary Research

Tufts University groundbreaking research on caterpillar locomotion could pave the way to designing first flexible robot to navigate through human body, pipelines, reactors

Tufts University neurobiologist Barry Trimmer is inching his way to unlocking the secrets behind the way caterpillars maneuver and climb, and is using that knowledge to one day build flexible robots that could explore internal organs, blood vessels and the insides of pipelines.

Trimmer recently received hi

Computers, for all of their computational muscle, do not hold a candle to humans in the ability to recognize patterns or images. This basic quandary in computational theory – why can computers crunch numbers but cannot efficiently process images – has stumped scientists for many years.

Now, researchers at Arizona State University have come up with a model that could help unlock some of the secrets of how humans process patterns and possibly lead to smarter robots. The advance concerns oscil

The International Council for Science (ICSU), one of the world’s oldest independent, non-governmental scientific organizations, has launched a completely new Web site (http://www.icsu.org). The diversified content and convivial style reflect ICSU’s interdisciplinary approach and longstanding commitment to international scientific cooperation.

This new site gives access to information on a wide spectrum of scientific topics relevant to both science and society. ICSU’s objective is to provide

The population of the aged, globally, is growing inexorably and by 2020, the figure will have risen by 25%. In fact, the number of those in their 80s will have more than doubled. This means changes in family structures: there are more and more elderly persons living alone while the number of carers is falling.

Falls are one of the most common problems amongst the elderly, 30% of them having a fall at least once a year and representing 75% of the total number of victims of falls. 70% of accid

A new discovery of microbial activity in 3.5 billion-year-old volcanic rock and one of earth’s earliest signs of geological existence sheds new light on the antiquity of life, says University of Alberta researchers who are part of a team that made the groundbreaking finding.

“People have been looking for signs of early bacteria for the last 50 years,” said Dr. Karlis Muehlenbachs, from the U of A’s Faculty of Science and an author on the paper just published in the journal Science

Innovation for People-this is what the project “Design for Well-Being” at Luleå University of Technology is all about. If people’s needs can be captured and carefully considered, then technology can help us feel better. This is the basic approach that is guiding eleven of the students in this year’s version of the course titled SIRIUS-Creative Product Development. Together with students from Stanford University and the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, they are developing a wheelchair