*New social features in Bing let users make decisions with help from their Facebook friends.*
REDMOND, Wash. — Bing is adding 500 million new friends, and they’re all going to help the search experience become a lot more social. (more…)
GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Customers often “like” businesses on Facebook, but when it comes to those companies’ ads on the social networking site, “dislike” is closer to the mark, says a University of Florida study of college-age users. (more…)
The human brain has yet to explain the origin of one its defining features – the deep fissures and convolutions that increase its surface area and allow for rational and abstract thoughts. (more…)
*Intervention focuses on couples in which one partner is HIV-positive*
Intervention programs that promote healthier eating, increased physical activity and cancer screenings may be beneficial for African American couples that are at high risk for chronic diseases and that include one partner who is HIV-positive, according to new research.
With such inverventions, each partner appears to draw encouragement from the other to monitor his or her own lifestyle and health, according to study co-author Gail Wyatt, a professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA and an associate director of the UCLA AIDS Institute. (more…)
*Avatar Kinect, the facial recognition technology coming to Kinect for Xbox 360 this spring, started out in the lab and soon will end up in the living room. Avatar Kinect’s journey from prototype to product shows how ideas move from research to product at Microsoft.*
REDMOND, Wash., – May 16, 2011 – When you smile, your Xbox 360 avatar will smile with you. (more…)
GAINESVILLE, Fla. — University of Florida researchers have described a new species of land crab that documents the first crab extinction during the human era. (more…)
*The molecular machinery bacteria use to rid themselves of toxic substances including antimicrobial drugs has been studied in detail by a UA-led team of researchers. A better understanding of these mechanisms could lead to new weapons in the fight against pathogens.*
Microbes have colonized virtually every spot on this planet, from deep sea vents spewing scalding seawater laden with heavy metals to the icy pinnacles of the world’s tallest mountain ranges. (more…)
EAST LANSING, Mich. — In a head-to-head battle of harvesting the sun’s energy, solar cells beat plants, according to a new paper in Science. But scientists think they can even up the playing field, says Michigan State University researcher David Kramer.
Plants are less efficient at capturing the energy in sunlight than solar cells mostly because they have too much evolutionary baggage. Plants have to power a living thing, whereas solar cells only have to send electricity down a wire. This is a big difference because if photosynthesis makes a mistake, it makes toxic byproducts that kill the organism. Photosynthesis has to be conservative to avoid killing the organisms it powers. (more…)
