The scientists from I.P. Pavlov Institute of Physiology, Russian Academy of Sciences, have investigated the intellectual abilities of chimpanzees in comparison with the children from a nursery school in Koltushy near St. Petersburg. They asked both to build the pyramids of cubes of different size. The children with the retention of speech development aged from 2 to 7 and two chimpanzees, female (aged 7) and male (aged 11) ones, took part in the experiment. The children and the apes were shown a pyra

Researchers at the University of Warwick’s Warwick Process Technology Group have devised a process that turns wet waste from sewage farms and paper mills into a source of power.

University of Warwick researcher Dr Ashok Bhattacharya and his team are part of a Europe wide consortium that have cracked the problem of how to extract very pure levels of hydrogen from wet bio-matter, such as sewage or paper mill waste. This very pure hydrogen can then be used in “fuel cells” to power homes, factor

Is it possible to make components out of organic polymers (plastics) whose structure is such that severed nerves can grow right into them and connect with electrodes in a prosthetic hand, for example? This is one of the research fields for Tobias Nyberg at the Section for Biomolecular and Organic Electronics at Linköping University, Sweden.

Part of Tobias Nyberg’s dissertation is based on collaboration with cell biologist Helena Jerregård. Her task is to find ways to get tangled nerves to s

A team including researchers at the Total Defense Research Institute, NBC Defense, in Umeå, Sweden, and the Department of Molecular Biology, Umeå University, are publishing in this week’s issue of Science new findings that show that the protein Ymt is of crucial importance for the capacity of the plague bacterium to survive and spread the plague via flea vectors. Professor Åke Forsberg and visiting researcher Dr. Peter Cherepanov are studying the properties that enable the plague bacterium Yersinia

The pressure on the environment of building during the past 5000 years can be observed clearly from the air. In a recent lecture at the Society of Chemical Industry (SCI), aerial photographer and concrete specialist Christopher Stanley illustrated the evolution of construction and its lasting impact, from stone circles to skyscrapers.

Stanley’s lecture ‘Managing the environment: a perspective from land, air and sea’ followed the presentation of the 2002 SCI Environment Medal in recognition o

Major new research examining the use of virtual surgery could revolutionise the way surgeons are trained in the future.

Experts use to believe that virtual reality, which allows trainee surgeons to feel and see exactly what they would if they were in the operating theatre, may help improve surgical skills, but it hadn’t been proved – until now.

The innovative research, by world experts from Yale University and Queen’s University Belfast, has shown that surgeons who trained o