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o Study shows how plants benefit from the use of natural latex o Researchers hope the study will help us understand how materials are used in nature o The project could show where to look for natural latex suitable for industrial applications Plants use natural latex in different ways, to help poison insects or rapidly heal wounds, a new study has found.

Plants use natural latex in different ways, to help poison insects or rapidly heal wounds, a new study has found. Scientists from the Universities of Oxford, Sheffield and Freiburg tested latex samples from two different types of plant. They found that Euphorbia plants use slow-drying latex to keep insects in with their noxious sap whereas Ficus plants, such as the weeping fig, use fast-drying latex to seal wounds more quickly.

The global wheat industry sometimes loses as much as $1 billion a year because prolonged rainfall and high humidity contribute to grains germinating before they are fully mature. The result is both a lower yield of wheat and grains of inferior quality. This phenomenon, known as pre-harvest sprouting or PHS, has such important economic repercussions for farmers around the world that scientists have been working on finding a solution to the problem for at least a couple of decades.

Comparing species, researchers at Harvard SEAS and Harvard Medical School investigate a process they dub "villification" "You are not just a ball of cells," says Clifford Tabin , George Jacob and Jacqueline Hazel Leder Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School (HMS) . The way cells organize within the human body allows us all to function the way we do, but a couple of Harvard professors are concerned as much with that developmental process as with the end result.

Fog-harvesting system developed by MIT and Chilean researchers could provide potable water for the world's driest regions. In some of this planet's driest regions, where rainfall is rare or even nonexistent, a few specialized plants and insects have devised ingenious strategies to provide themselves with the water necessary for life: They pull it right out of the air, from fog that drifts in from warm oceans nearby.

UAlberta research paves way for nanoparticle-based 'ink' to make printable or spray-on solar cells. University of Alberta researchers have found that abundant materials in the Earth's crust can be used to make inexpensive and easily manufactured nanoparticle-based solar cells.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) analyzed more than 50,000 home sales near 67 wind facilities in 27 counties across nine U.S. states, yet was unable to uncover any impacts to nearby home property values. "This is the second of two major studies we have conducted on this topic [the first was published in 2009 - see below], and in both studies [using two different datasets] we find no statistical evidence that operating wind turbines have had any measureable impact on home sales prices," says Ben Hoen, the lead author of the new report.

The splash from rain hitting a windowpane or printer ink hitting paper all comes down to tiny droplets hitting a surface, and what each of those droplets does. Cornell researchers have produced a high-resolution "photo album" of more than 30 shapes an oscillated drop of water can take. The results, a fundamental insight into how droplets behave, could have applications in everything from inkjet printing to microfluidics.

Stanford mechanical engineer Sunil Puria is unraveling the mysteries of bone conduction hearing, which could lead to a better understanding of hearing - and some types of hearing loss. It is a question that has long perplexed paleontologists and auditory scientists - and mechanical engineer Sunil Puria , a consulting associate professor at Stanford: Why do mammals have three middle ear bones? "Reptiles don't have them," Puria muses in his office in Durand Hall.

Scientists at the Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde have discovered rotational speed can be determined by measuring Doppler Shift - the same effect utilised in radar speed guns. Doppler Shift is a phenomenon everyone is aware of, if perhaps not by name, and is most often experienced by the sound of a siren from a police car or ambulance rising and falling in pitch as it passes by.

A collaborative project involving Imperial and the UAE is assessing the potential of date palm leaves as a renewable, low-carbon building material. Phoenix dactylifera, or the date palm tree, is perhaps best known for its sweet fruit but, as growers in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have known for thousands of years, its leaves can also be used in construction.

Don't hire someone to wash your dirty solar panels. That's the conclusion of a study recently conducted by a team of engineers at the University of California, San Diego. Their Researchers found panels that hadn't been cleaned, or rained on, for 145 days during a summer drought in California, lost only 7.4 percent of their efficiency.

Turbulence is all around us-in the patterns that natural gas makes as it swirls through a transcontinental pipeline or in the drag that occurs as a plane soars through the sky. Reducing such turbulence on say, an airplane wing, would cut down on the amount of power the plane has to put out just to get through the air, thereby saving fuel.

The mystery of the hexagonal shape of honeycomb cells has been revealed by simple mechanics. The honeybee comb is a widely studied natural cellular structure. The rounded hexagonal shape of its cells has intrigued natural scientists and philosophers for millennia. They have suggested many explanations some of which would need the bees to have an uncanny ability ("forethought" according to Pappus of Alexandria in 4 AD) to perform mathematical calculations or the magical quality to measure lengths and angles.

Tidal turbines stretched across Pentland Firth, which separates the Orkney Islands from mainland Scotland, could generate up to 1.9 gigawatts (GW) of power - equivalent to almost half of Scotland's electricity needs. A new study, led by Oxford University researchers, provides the first reliable estimate of the maximum energy that could be generated from Pentland Firth.

UAlberta researchers show that a simple glass surface can be made to repel oil underwater. University of Alberta mechanical engineering researchers have shown that a simple glass surface can be made to repel oil underwater. This has huge implications for development of a chemical repellent technology for use in cleaning up oil spills.

Systems such as a beating heart or a power grid that depend on the synchronized movement of their parts could fall prey to an invisible and chaotic tug-of-war known as a "chimera." Sharing its name with the fire-breathing, zoologically patchy creature of Greek mythology, a chimera state arises among identical, rhythmically moving components — known as oscillators — when a few of those parts spontaneously fall out of sync while the rest remain synchronized.

Associate instrument innovators Leland Greenler, left, and Dan Wahl measure the individual tension of thousands of tiny woven wires that make up a prototype neutrino-target screen being designed at the UW-Madison Physical Sciences Lab. Photos: Jeff Miller Sequestered in the farmland near Stoughton, an unusual UW-Madison facility — part machine shop, part design lab, part physics outpost — continues to make machines, equipment and detectors for the world's most advanced experiments.

The chance of infection in some NHS wards varies dramatically according to whether the nurses leave the windows open. A University of Leeds-led team studied airflow in a “Nightingale” ward—the classic NHS ward that traditionally accommodated two rows of up to 30 beds—using tracer gases to simulate how airborne infections spread.

As demand for computing and communication capacity surges, the global communication infrastructure struggles to keep pace, since the light signals transmitted through fiber-optic lines must still be processed electronically, creating a bottleneck in tele networks. While the idea of developing an optical transistor to get around this problem is alluring to scientists and engineers, it has also remained an elusive vision, despite years of experiments with various approaches.