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Tag: "inspiration" at biology news

Art and music for the birds

Nature is a valued source of inspiration for artists. But what have artists offered the natural world" Would a bird even like rock and roll" Conceptual sculptor Elizabeth Demaray, an assistant professor of fine arts at Rutgers University—Camden, is testing the musical tastes of our fine fe...

Rewarding fat rats

...ntists and engineers look to the natural world for inspiration and guidance as they build intelligent machines. Ongoing research has already produced some computer programs and robots that can learn from experience and adapt their behaviour to a complex, constantly changing environment. We can expect that this t...

'Failed' experiment yields a biocontrol agent that doesn't trigger antibiotic resistance

...n College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. His inspiration came one morning in 1999 when he was puzzling over a failed experiment. A researcher in his lab had been trying to insert two different mutations into an ordinary bacterial plasmid - a routine task for the experienced scientist - but every attempt f...

Researchers to develop active nanoscale surfaces for biological separations

... and proteomics. The researchers are taking their inspiration from nature, mimicking the very membranes that surround our cells to create platforms for separating biological molecules. These "lipid bilayers," which are made up of two opposing layers of fat molecules, act as the cell's barrier to the outside wor...

New system could drastically reduce herbicide use

...hen placed directly on the plants. The original inspiration for this robot came several years ago, when Tian and two graduate students were working on remote sensing systems for a CFAR (Council on Food and Agricultural Research) project. "We were collecting field data from satellite imagery, such as soil m...

Researchers discover how bacteria sense their environments

...eral mechanism for cellular signaling and serve as inspiration for developing molecular devices. Such devices could be used to sense a wide range of chemicals, light, ionic strength (salt), pH and heavy metals with great sensitivity, gain and dynamic range. Scientists are interested in developing synthetic syste...

Copying nature could save us energy, study shows

...t way." Although mankind has looked to nature for inspiration for generations, 'biomimetic' devices are a relatively recent phenomenon. The stable wing in aeroplanes, Velcro and self-cleaning paint are all simple devices based on natural inspiration. The Centre for Biomimetic and Natural Technologies at the Un...

Methane-belching bugs inspire a new theory of the origin of life on Earth

...ochemical process--their discovery also became the inspiration for a fundamental new theory of the origin of life on Earth, reconciling a long-contentious pair of prevailing theories. This new, "thermodynamic" theory of evolution improves upon both previous theories by proposing a central role for energy conser...

New MRI technique quickly builds 3-D images of knees

...mple, when imaging a joint like the knee - Block's inspiration for developing the new technique - suppressing the fat signal in bone provides image contrast between bone and the cartilage surface. The conventional data-acquisition method would spend half its scan time suppressing the signal from fat, instead of ...

Sooner is better with cochlear implants, Stanford scientist shows

...kills. But most of his work is done with owls. The inspiration for the study in children came from a casual talk between Knudsen and Nathan Fox, PhD, director of the University of Maryland's Child Development Lab. In their conversation, they discussed a phenomenon called the McGurk effect, which is an illusion f...

Biotechnology's newest chemical tool

...e can perform different grasping actions. Taking inspiration from the real hand, where a muscle pulls a tendon inside a synovial sheath, CYBERHAND's finger cables run through a Teflon sheath pulled by a DC motor. So the proximal, medial and distal phalanges, those bones between your finger knuckles, are all dr...

Scientists and engineers apply nature's design to human problems

... robots. Yen noted that biomimetry even offers inspiration for the way students -- and faculty ?learn. "Like animals, we can learn by playing," Yen explained. "We're looking to nature as our template." WRITER: Jane Sanders ...

Insects, viruses could hold key for better human teamwork in disasters

...he research team at Illinois is attempting to draw inspiration from the collaboration patterns that honeybees and ants use, and the spread patterns viruses typically take. The ideas the researchers develop will "augment current collaboration among first responders, including civil engineers, to extreme events i...

Nature provides inspiration for important new adhesive

... could be adapted for this purpose, Li had another inspiration at lunch - while eating tofu. "Soy beans, from which tofu are made, are a crop that's abundantly produced in the U.S. and has a very high content of protein," Li said. Soy protein is inexpensive and renewable, but it lacks the unique amino acid with...

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