news 2014

Computer text analysis of a huge database of scientific papers shows a large amount of "text overlap," where authors use text from previous papers of their own and others, not always with attribution. This is not necessarily good or bad, Cornell researchers say. "Our first goal was to characterize the accepted practice, not to be judgmental," said Paul Ginsparg, professor of physics and information science and founder of the online arXiv collection of scientific papers, now maintained by Cornell University Library.

An Imperial mathematician has found a new way of formulating a 50 year old algorithm, used when describing the world using mathematical models. It is anticipated that the proposed technique, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), will pave the way for greatly accelerating the calculations involved when making predictions about the behaviour of complex systems in many different areas of science and engineering.

In a triumph for cell biology, researchers have assembled the first high-resolution, 3D maps of entire folded genomes and found a structural basis for gene regulation-a kind of "genomic origami" that allows the same genome to produce different types of cells. The research appears online today in Cell .

Astronomers have measured the passing of a super-Earth in front of a bright, nearby Sun-like star using a ground-based telescope for the first time. The transit of the exoplanet 55 Cancri e is the shallowest detected from the ground yet. Since detecting a transit is the first step in analyzing a planet's atmosphere, this success bodes well for characterizing the many small planets that upcoming space missions are expected to discover in the next few years.

Girls better than boys at making story-based computer games, study finds Teenage boys are perhaps more known for playing computer games but girls are better at making them, a University of Sussex study has found. Researchers in the University's Informatics department asked pupils at a secondary school to design and program their own computer game using a new visual programming language that shows pupils the computer programs they have written in plain English.

A growing number of academic researchers are mining social media data to learn about both online and offline human behaviour. In recent years, studies have claimed the ability to predict everything from summer blockbusters to fluctuations in the stock market. But mounting evidence of flaws in many of these studies points to a need for researchers to be wary of serious pitfalls that arise when working with huge social media data sets, according to computer scientists at McGill University in Montreal and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

Researchers working on artificial intelligence at Queen Mary have taught a computer to create magic tricks. The researchers from the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science gave a computer program the outline of how a magic jigsaw puzzle and a mind reading card trick work, as well the results of experiments into how humans understand magic tricks, and the system created completely new variants on those tricks which can be delivered by a magician.

Devavrat Shah's group at MIT's Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) specializes in analyzing how social networks process information. In 2012, the group demonstrated algorithms that could predict what topics would trend on Twitter up to five hours in advance; this year, they used the same framework to predict fluctuations in the prices of the online currency known as Bitcoin.

Scientists at King's have built on research they conducted last year to achieve previously unseen levels of control over the travelling direction of electromagnetic wave in waveguides and proved that the process works equally well in reverse, opening up the way for the development of technologies that could revolutionise secure communications as well as high speed computing.

Scientists teamed up to develop a chemical "processor" which reliably shows the fastest way through a City maze. As the method is basically faster than a satnav system, it could be useful in transport planning and logistics in the future, for instance, as the scientists report. You don't always need GPS, a map or a compass to find the right way.

Scientists have solved a long-standing mystery surrounding Australia's only active volcanic area, in the country's southeast. The research explains a volcanic region that has seen more than 400 volcanic events in the past four million years. The 500 kilometre long region stretches from Melbourne to the South Australian town of Mount Gambier, which surrounds a dormant volcano that last erupted only 5,000 years ago.

Capping decades of searching, Princeton scientists observe elusive particle that is its own antiparticle Posted October 2, 2014; 04:00 p.m. by Steven Schultz, Office of Engineering Communications Princeton University scientists have observed an exotic particle that behaves simultaneously like matter and antimatter, a feat of math and engineering that could eventually enable powerful computers based on quantum mechanics.

A little-known secret in data mining is that simply feeding raw data into a data analysis algorithm is unlikely to produce meaningful results, say the authors of a new Cornell study. From recognizing speech to identifying unusual stars, new discoveries often begin with comparison of data streams to find connections and spot outliers.

The integration of digital expert knowledge and automation of risk analyses can greatly improve software test procedures and make cloud computing more secure. This is shown by the latest results of a project of the University of Innsbruck, funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF, on the quality assurance of security critical systems which have recently been published.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. Penn State researchers have received a $262,383 grant from the National Science Foundation to better understand why people disclose or withhold private information during online transactions.

Birds have been found to display superior judgement of their body width compared to humans, in research to help design autonomous aircraft navigation systems. A University of Queensland (UQ) study has found that budgerigars can fly between gaps almost as narrow as their outstretched wingspan rather than taking evasive measures such as tucking in their wings.

computer science Ph.D. student Keaton Mowery and Computer science professor Hovav Shacham. Photos by Erik Jepsen/UC San Diego Publications A team of researchers from the University of California, San Diego, the University of Michigan, and Johns Hopkins University have discovered several security vulnerabilities in full-body backscatter X-ray scanners deployed to U.S. airports between 2009 and 2013.

Ion channels are involved in many physiological and pathophysiological processes throughout the human body. A young team of researchers led by pharmacologist Anna Stary-Weinzinger from the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, University of Vienna investigated how ion flux through a voltage gated sodium ion channel works in detail.

Cardiff University researchers will discover public perceptions of the recent horse meat scandal for the first time by analysing social media data. The horse meat scandal last year revealed a major breakdown in the traceability of the food supply chain and the adulteration of meat. The extensive media coverage revealed not only widespread fraud but also the complexity of the UK meat supply chain and the extent of meat imports.

Researchers at MIT, Microsoft, and Adobe have developed an algorithm that can reconstruct an audio signal by analyzing minute vibrations of objects depicted in video. In one set of experiments, they were able to recover intelligible speech from the vibrations of a potato-chip bag photographed from 15 feet away through soundproof glass.