What can bees teach us about speed shopping?
Does trading off speed for accuracy pay?

“Bumblebees have been shown to have very fine colour vision – which they can use to find up to 5,000 flowers a day,” says says Melbourne scientist Adrian Dyer who first made the observations whilst working in Germany.

Adrian’s study published in Nature casts light on how they do it – and may help us to learn from the bees how to design robot eyes in the future.

Adrian is

Melbourne scientists plan to harness the strange appetite of newly discovered Australian bacteria to help purify arsenic-contaminated water.

The research group, led by microbiologist Dr Joanne Santini of La Trobe University, is working out how to use bacteria that eat arsenic to clean up contaminated wastewater in Australian and overseas mining environments and drinking wells in Bangladesh and West Bengal, India.

Dr Santini presented her research at Fresh Science, a British Council

Innovative students and professors at the University of Rochester have created a navigational assistant that can help inform a visually impaired person of his whereabouts, or even bring new dimensions to museum navigation or campus tours for sighted individuals. The system, nicknamed “NAVI” for Navigational Assistance for the Visually Impaired, uses radio signals to gauge when someone is near passive transponders that can be as small as a grain of rice and located on the outside of a building, on a s

Technical Insights’ High Tech Materials Alert

Scientists have discovered that when lattice tungsten filaments are heated, they are capable of emitting greater energy than solid tungsten filaments.

“Because of this significant advance, lattice tungsten filaments will likely meet the increasing power requirements of high-tech electrical systems, such as those in hybrid electric cars, sophisticated boats, engines, and industrial waste heat-driven electrical generators,” sa

Group of compounds found in red wine, vegetables simulate benefit of low-calorie diet

Mice, rats, worms, flies, and yeast all live longer on a low-calorie diet, which also seems to protect mammals against cancer and other aging-related diseases. Now, in yeast cells, researchers at Harvard Medical School and BIOMOL Research Laboratories have for the first time found a way to duplicate the benefits of restricted calories in yeast with a group of compounds found in red wine and vegetable

Multifocal intraocular lenses improve near vision without compromising distance vision. However, patients with these intraocular lenses may experience reduced contrast sensitivity and they may see haloes around lights. These are the conclusions of a study appearing in the September issue of Ophthalmology, the clinical journal of the American Academy of Ophthalmology, the Eye M.D. Association.

Monofocal lenses are the current standard of treatment, but usually require spectacles for near vis