Odour is an affective stimulus that elicits both positive as well as negative emotional responses. This has implications for the way consumers evaluate products. Odour as a marketing tool has received an increased amount of attention recently. Retailers are exploring the impact of scents on consumers’ purchase behaviour (think for example about the smell of fresh pastries when you enter a supermarket). Nowadays, technological developments enable the use of scent-patches on packaging and ads, which ma

The way a person taps a number into a cash machine or mobile phone, could, according to scientists at the University of Southampton, be used as a means of identification, and prove useful in the battle against fraud.

Professor Neil White of the University of Southampton’s Department of Electronics and Computer Science has developed an inexpensive sensor, which can be integrated into objects of various shapes and sizes, including smart cards and hand-held devices such as mobile phones.

As the deadline for compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act draws closer, the commuter and passenger trains used in large swaths of the United States remain inaccessible to passengers in wheelchairs. Meanwhile, the elevated platforms many regional rail systems have erected to address this problem have created another, forcing bulky freight shipments off the rails and onto some of the busiest roadways in the nation.

Enter an engineering professor from the University of Pennsylvani

The same in-road detectors that control traffic lights and monitor traffic could soon respond quicker to traffic jams, thanks to software developed by an Ohio State University engineer.

In tests, the software helped California road crews discover traffic jams three times faster than before, allowing them to clear accidents and restore traffic flow before many other drivers would be delayed.

This technology could also provide drivers with the information they need to plan efficient

An Ohio State University engineer and his colleagues have discovered something new about a 50-year-old type of fiberglass: it may be more than one and a half times stronger than previously thought.

That conclusion, and the techniques engineers used to reach it, could help expand applications for glass fibers.

Though the glass fiber industry is currently suffering the same economic woes as many other businesses, the time is right to lay the groundwork for future applications, said P

DM2 more common than previously thought

Researchers at the University of Minnesota Medical School’s Muscular Dystrophy Center have developed the first reliable diagnostic test for myotonic muscular dystrophy type 2 (DM2), leading to the accurate determination of the disease’s clinical and molecular features. Initial results indicate that DM2 is much more common than previously thought, and may be one of the more common forms of muscular dystrophy. The findings will be reported in the