Scottish company IceRobotics will develop a new generation of dairy farm robots, working in a way that is similar to an elephant’s trunk, that can milk cows without the presence of the farmer, thanks to an Invention & Innovation award of £98,000 from NESTA (the National Endowment for Science, Technology & the Arts), the organisation that invests in UK creativity and innovation.

While studying for his PhD, Dr Bruce Davies, a senior lecturer at Heriot-Watt University, came up with the id

Authors of a research letter in this week’s issue of THE LANCET highlight how screening for Down’s syndrome based on maternal age and four markers in maternal blood should be used worldwide-the quadruple test is far more effective than screening based on maternal age alone.

Screening for Down’s syndrome is widely practised early in the second trimester of pregnancy (weeks 14 to 22). The quadruple test calculates the risk of a Down’s syndrome term pregnancy from maternal age and the concentr

Exactly fifty years ago, Watson and Crick revealed the structure of DNA, unleashing a scientific revolution. On the anniversary of that momentous discovery, the world’s leading science journal, Nature, will publish new and groundbreaking genetic research by Bangor University scientist, Dr. Isabelle Colson. Isabelle is an expert in evolutionary biology, the study of how life evolves, and for 18 months she was an invaluable part of a Manchester-based team studying mutation in yeast – a seemingly simple

Scientists at the University of the West of England and the University of Sheffield have won funding to create a robotic system based on the whiskers of a rat.
The system would mimic the biological rat whisker and would provide an entirely new and groundbreaking modality for mobile robots working in confined spaces.

Known as ‘Whiskerbot’ the project will bring together experts in robotics from UWE with experts from Sheffield University who specialise in computer modelling of the brains o

Scientists from the University of Colorado at Boulder have proposed a long-sought answer to how atmospheric sulfate aerosols are formed in the stratosphere.

Conducted by researchers at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, or CIRES, the research shows how a fundamental molecular process driven by sunlight may play a significant role in determining the planet’s energy budget.

The research was a collaboration between Veronica Vaida, chair of the CU-B

A close relative of a common little-understood human virus that causes an estimated 23 million episodes of intestinal illness, 50,000 hospitalizations and 300 deaths each year has been discovered in mice. The finding by scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis is reported in the March 7 issue of the journal Science.

Discovery of the new virus, known as murine norovirus 1 (MNV-1), may lead to a better understanding of its disease-causing cousins known as No