As the hot, humid weather descended on Houston’s Harris County this spring, the county’s mosquito surveillance team geared up for the busiest season in its fight to get ahead of dangerous mosquito-borne illnesses such as Zika. (more…)
An evolutionarily ancient and tiny part of the brain tracks expectations about nasty events, finds new UCL research funded by the Medical Research Council.
The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, demonstrates for the first time that the human habenula, half the size of a pea, tracks predictions about negative events, like painful electric shocks, suggesting a role in learning from bad experiences. (more…)
Your eye could someday house its own high-tech information center, tracking important changes and letting you know when it’s time to see an eye doctor.
University of Washington engineers have designed a low-power sensor that could be placed permanently in a person’s eye to track hard-to-measure changes in eye pressure. The sensor would be embedded with an artificial lens during cataract surgery and would detect pressure changes instantaneously, then transmit the data wirelessly using radio frequency waves. (more…)
Computer model can help with current, future clean-up efforts
St. Petersburg, Fla. – A newly developed computer model holds the promise of helping scientists track and predict where oil will go after a spill, sometimes years later. U.S. Geological Survey scientists developed the model as a way of tracking the movement of sand and oil found along the Gulf of Mexico since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The new tool can help guide clean-up efforts, and be used to aid the response to future oil spills. (more…)
The fin whale is the second-largest animal ever to live on Earth. It is also, paradoxically, one of the least understood. The animal’s huge size and global range make its movements and behavior hard to study.
A carcass that washed up on a Seattle-area beach this spring provided a reminder that sleek fin whales, nicknamed “greyhounds of the sea,” are vulnerable to collision when they strike fast-moving ships. Knowing their swimming behaviors could help vessels avoid the animals. Understanding where and what they eat could also help support the fin whale’s slowly rebounding populations. (more…)
Robotic boats track radio-tagged common carp in area lakes
As a stiff breeze sweeps across Staring Lake in suburban Minneapolis, a five-foot, antenna-sporting robotic boat plies the water in a back-and-forth pattern.
On the shore, Volkan Isler follows the action as two graduate research assistants launch a second boat.
Today Isler, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Minnesota, and graduate students Pratap Tokekar and Josh Vander Hook have come to the lake to test the newer of the boats. Their mission: developing a new technology to track invasive fish. (more…)
