Telemedicine is the use of telecommunication and information technologies to provide clinical health care at a distance. It helps eliminate distance barriers and can improve access to medical services that would often not be consistently available in distant rural communities. It is also used to save lives in critical care and emergency situations. Although there were distant precursors to telemedicine, it is essentially a product of 20th century telecommunication and information technologies...

University of Tokyo is developing a wearable and modular device allowing users to perceive and respond to spatial information using haptic cues in an intuitive and unobtrusive way. The system is composed of an array of "optical-hair modules", each of which senses range information and transduces it as an appropriate vibro-tactile cue on the skin directly beneath it (the module can be embedded on clothes or strapped to body parts as in the figures below). An analogy for our artificial sensory sys...

NASA is developing the capabilities needed to send humans to an asteroid by 2025 and Mars in the 2030s – goals outlined in the bipartisan NASA Authorization Act of 2010 and in the U.S. National Space Policy, also issued in 2010. Mars is a rich destination for scientific discovery and robotic and human exploration as we expand our presence into the solar system. Its formation and evolution are comparable to Earth, helping us learn more about our own planet’s history and future. Mars had condit...

In mathematics, four-dimensional space ("4D") is a geometric space with four dimensions. It typically is more specifically four-dimensional Euclidean space, generalizing the rules of three-dimensional Euclidean space. It has been studied by mathematicians and philosophers for over two centuries, both for its own interest and for the insights it offered into mathematics and related fields. Algebraically, it is generated by applying the rules of vectors and coordinate geometry to a space with f...

There are three phases to falling in love and different hormones are involved at each stage. Events occurring in the brain when we are in love have similarities with mental illness. When we are attracted to somebody, it could be because subconsciously we like their genes. Smell could be as important as looks when it comes to the fanciability factor. We like the look and smell of people who are most like our parents. Science can help determine whether a relationship will last. In the attrac...

Scientists in Britain have applied for permission to genetically modify human embryos as part of a research project into the earliest stages of human development. The work marks a controversial first for the UK and comes only months after Chinese researchers became the only team in the world to announce they had altered the DNA of human embryos. Kathy Niakan, a stem cell scientist at the Francis Crick Institute in London, has asked the government’s fertility regulator for a licence to perf...

  Drosophila Motility, Behaviour and Ageing The main scientific objectives of the experiment are to study in more detail the mechanisms of the abnormal motility response encountered in space by young flies with consequences on the posterior aging response of the flies. For this purpose, three different fly strains with different phenotypes are used, in four configurations. The three strains are a long-lived strain, a short-lived strain and a strain showing an abnormal gravitropic resp...

Automatic stereotyping Most of us sincerely believe that we aren’t prejudiced, Psychologists have studied automatic stereotyping — the fact that just having knowledge of a stereotype automatically triggers prejudiced thoughts and behaviors when we see a person from a stereotyped group. They suggest that these stereotypes have become so well learned that they have become unconscious. However, on the hopeful side, some researchers believe that conscious cognitive effort to inhibit stereotypes may...

Irreducible complexity (IC) is a pseudoscientific argument that certain biological systems cannot be evolved by successive, slight modifications to a functional precursor system through natural selection acting upon a series of advantageous naturally occurring chance mutations. Michael Behe, a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University, first argued that irreducible complexity made evolution purely through natural selection of random mutations impossible. However, evolutionary biologists ...

Plans are afoot to build a manned base on the Moon. NASA's Exploration Technology Development Program is working on everything that will be needed to make the Moon a place where a crew of astronauts can live for months. Explorers from Earth will have to build their own habitat, or home. Their home must protect them like no home on Earth would ever need to do. There is no air on the Moon. And the temperature varies from 387 degrees Fahrenheit BELOW zero (-233 Celsius) at night to 253 deg...

Space Garden setup on International Space Station NASA and international community have worked together and setup space garden. VEGGIE is a deployable plant growth unit setup on the Space Station to demonstrate the feasibility of a space garden. The experiment facility provides lighting and nutrient supply and is capable of supporting a variety of plant species that can be cultivated for educational outreach, fresh food and even recreation for crewmembers on long-duration missions. Thermal ...

A new NOAA study, published in the journal Ecological Modeling, forecasts an increase in ciguatera fish poisoning in the Gulf of Mexico and the U.S. Southeast Atlantic coast with predicted rising global ocean temperatures due to climate change. People can be affected by ciguatera, the most common form of algal-induced seafood poisoning, by eating contaminated tropical marine reef fish such as grouper, snapper and barracuda. Scientists are now predicting that global climate change will ciguatera,...

US scientists have bred a genetically modified mosquito that is incapable of spreading malaria to humans, according to reports. A gene editing technique called Crispr was used to alter the genetic makeup of the insect, making it resistant to Plasmodium falciparum, one of the parasites that causes malaria in humans. Crucially, the GM mosquitoes passed on their anti-malarial DNA strain to 99.5% of their offspring, raising the prospect of the altered species being released in the wild one day to co...

A new mobile phone app designed to help aid workers predict where hunger may strike and provide help in good time was launched by Austrian scientists on Thursday. The app, which is free to use, combines and analyses satellite data and information collected through crowdsourcing using mobile phones, and creates a map highlighting areas at risk of food shortages and malnutrition. Useful information includes how often people in an area eat or whether there is civil unrest that might prevent people ...

A new material with micropores might be a way to fight climate change. Scientists have created crystals that capture carbon dioxide much more efficiently than previously known materials, even in the presence of water. The research was recently published in a report in the scientific journal Science. One way to mitigate climate change could be to capture carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air. So far this has been difficult, since the presence of water prevents the adsorption of CO2. Complete dehyd...

BYU is leading a collaborative team that has just kicked off a massive multidisciplinary effort to combat a threat to global health, the rising prevalence of bacteria that can’t be treated by antibiotics. Four BYU professors from three colleges have joined forces on the multi-year, National Institutes of Health-sponsored effort to create a faster diagnostic test for drug-resistant blood infections. As it stands now, diagnostic tests for these types of infections can take up to three days to prod...

Antarctic ice shelf collapse and unstoppable sea level rise 'very likely' without tough climate action, say scientists. Warming of 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius above current levels could lead to "unstoppable" sea level rise that would last for thousands of years. The new model, published today in Nature, shows that such temperatures would result in 80 to 85 per cent loss of major Antarctic ice shelves, something that is possible by the end of the century under existing IPCC scenarios. Collapse of th...

University of British Columbia students have developed a probiotic for honey bees, which they’ve coined the ‘pro-bee-otic.’ This innovative study by a group of UBC students is regarding the development a probiotic for honey bees. This is a particularly important solution, as global bee declines are a major problem and so much of the food we eat depends on pollination by insects. The students want to address this important issue and they feel that betting probiotics could be the key to prot...

Using NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered the first Earth-size planet orbiting a star in the "habitable zone" -- the range of distance from a star where liquid water might pool on the surface of an orbiting planet. The discovery of Kepler-186f confirms that planets the size of Earth exist in the habitable zone of stars other than our sun. While planets have previously been found in the habitable zone, they are all at least 40 percent larger in size than Earth and unders...

An 18-year-old from Canada has invented a way to clean up the toxic waste produced from extracting oil from tar sands. Hayley Todesco used knowledge gained from fifth grade science to come up with a filtration system using sand and bacteria to quickly break down the waste. This waste is usually stored in tailings ponds, where it will take centuries to break down. In 2010, tailings ponds took up about 68 square miles (176 square kilometers), but by 2020 that area is expected to grow to 96.5 sq...

Brain-Computer Interfacing (BCI) is a hot area of research. In the past year alone we’ve looked at a system to allow people to control a robotic arm and another that enables users to control an ASIMO robot with nothing but the power of thought. Such systems rely on the use of an electroencephalograph (EEG) to capture brain waves and translate them into commands to control a machine. Now researchers at the University of Southampton have used a similar technique to show it is possible to transmit ...