science wire

Ants use collective decision-making to select the best option when choosing a new home. Until now, the exact way in which they do this has puzzled researchers. A new study, led by the University of Bristol and published in Royal Society Open Science, found that while some are happy to slum it out in anything with a roof, others are so choosy that even the equivalent of a mansion will not satisfy them.

Stanford engineers have partnered with the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) to set a computational record.

Stanford engineers highlight the limitation of a popular technique for one-way optical data transmission on computer chips. Optics, a form of data transmission that utilizes beams of light, has the promise to outperform the beams of electrons that drive your computer or smartphone. Engineers have long sought a way to miniaturize optical technology, which is present in today's fast-paced fiber-optic cables, so they can bring the speed and efficiency of light-based data transmission to a computer chip.

With than ever at our fingertips, statisticians are vital to innumerable fields and industries. Welcome to the world of the datarati, where humans and machines team up to crunch the numbers.

Decentralized partially observable Markov decision processes are a way to model autonomous robots' behavior in circumstances where neither their communication with each other nor their judgments about the outside world are perfect.

Big data has captured the world's attention, with talk of a new Industrial Revolution based on information, and of data being one of the 21st century's most valuable commodities.

Konstantin Sonin, a prominent Russian scholar whose research interests include development economics, economic theory and political economy, will join the faculty of the Harris School of Public Policy this fall.

By Shilo Rea / 412-268-6094 / shilo [a] cmu (p) edu The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has awarded a five-year, up to $20 million grant to establish a Forensic Science Center of Excellence.

Quantum computers are largely theoretical devices that could perform some computations exponentially faster than conventional computers can.

As anyone who's ever used a spreadsheet can attest, it's often convenient to organize data into tables.

Photography used to be limited to flat, two-dimensional images. Today, the art and science of image capture is spurred by optics, computation and electronics, and Cornell engineers are working on the cutting edges of 3-D imaging.

Hundreds of cities will now be able to compare themselves against other leading cities with the release of standardized data looking at everything from youth unemployment to energy consumption.

Once again, Yale mathematician Nathan Kaplan has packed up his polynomials and hit the TV game show circuit. Kaplan, a Gibbs Assistant Professor in Mathematics, will be a contestant on the syndicated TV program "Let's Ask America," in an episode airing May 8. He participated in the show via Skype from his Dunham Lab office, with a Yale pennant and Pascal's Triangle - expanding rows of binomial coefficients as visually entertaining as any TV graphic - in the background.

In the sixth year of the Early Career Research Program managed by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science, two researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) were on the list of 44 recipients announced today.

Fellowship of the Royal Society has been granted to two scientists at Imperial College London this month.

UCLA Tim Tangherlini, a scholar of Danish folklore at UCLA, has used big-data analysis to discover surprising connections among stories and storytellers.

The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) should hold interest rates steady at 2.25 per cent ahead of the May 12 budget due to a lack of clear direction for the Australian economy, the ANU RBA Shadow Board has found.

They are among 47 new Fellows announced by the Royal Society today.

Full Fact, the UK's independent, non-partisan fact-checking organisation, has set up its election headquarters in King's College London's Anatomy Theatre.

Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Taps Carnegie Mellon Statistician To Lead Informatics and Statistics Science-Carnegie Mellon News - Carnegie Mellon University By Shilo Rea / 412-268-6094 Starting in

Most recent advances in artificial intelligence - such as mobile apps that convert speech to text - are the result of machine learning, in which computers are turned loose on huge data sets to look for patterns.

What do data scientists and social scientists have in common? Not nearly enough - yet.

The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) doesn't need to cut interest rates a second time this year and should hold rates steady after its April board meeting, The Australian National University (ANU) RBA Shadow Board has found.

By Shilo Rea / 412-268-6094 / shilo [a] cmu (p) edu / and Jocelyn Duffy / 412-268-9982 / jhduffy [a] andrew.cmu (p) edu According to a 2014 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report, autism - a complex developmental disorder - will affect one out of every 68 children born in the United States.

Integer overflows are one of the most common bugs in computer programs - not only causing programs to crash but, even worse, potentially offering points of attack for malicious hackers.

Mathematicians at the Universities of Nottingham and Oxford have won one of the largest ever pure maths research grants awarded in the EU — £2.3m to work on solutions of some of the most famous unsolved maths problems. The Millennium problems are seven mathematical questions which were chosen by a committee of world-leading mathematicians and proposed by the Clay Mathematics Institute in the United States in the year 2000.

A major £2.8 million project is to find ways to address the UK's airport congestion - without relying solely on new airport building and expansion.

Researchers who study fruit flies to gain insight into in-flight stabilization have uncovered a particular detail on how these insects right themselves during a midair roll. Postdoctoral fellow Tsevi Beatus, working with Itai Cohen, associate professor of physics, and John Guckenheimer, professor of mathematics, have discovered that flies stabilize themselves during flight using a control reflex that's among the fastest in the animal kingdom.

An expert in classics and a scholar of comparative literature. A statistician and a historian of film.

  Jeroen Tromp, Princeton's Blair Professor of Geology and a professor of geosciences and applied and computational mathematics, is using seismic wave data from earthquakes and the Titan supercomputer

Inspired by the 1970s Space Invaders video game, a small and colourful mosaic has been found on the International Space Station by ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti.

Catherine Harris, Research Fellow in EU Migration at the University of Sheffield, explores a claim by UKIP that the UK is the most crowded country in Europe.

Three University of Glasgow staff members and one PhD student are heading to Westminster to present research to a range of politicians and a panel of expert judges, as part of SET for Britain on Monday 9 March.

The little-known field of fluctuating hydrodynamics could have enormous impacts in applications ranging from batteries to drug delivery to microfluidic devices.

Grants Will Provide Seed Funding for Innovative Ideas in Neuroscience By Jocelyn Duffy / 412-268-9982 / jhduffy [a] andrew.cmu (p) edu / and Shilo Rea / 412-268-6094 / shilo [a] cmu (p) edu Carnegie Mellon University has funded eight new neuroscience projects through its ProSEED grant program.

New brain evidence provides insight into why highly anxious people are worst at making decisions when things get unpredictable (Illustration by Ian Smiley) Highly anxious people have more trouble deciding how best to handle life's uncertainties. They may even catastrophize, interpreting, say, a lovers' tiff as a doomed relationship or a workplace change as a career threat.

There are clear signs the weaker dollar is helping the domestic economy. However, the danger is that Australia is becoming embroiled in the global currency war.

Children don't have to be told that "cat" and "cats" are variants of the same word—they pick it up just by listening.

Future cars and trucks will be tested in a virtual environment long before the first vehicle prototype is built.

The Cannes Film Festival may have the Caméra d'Or for debut filmmakers - but the research world has the Sloan Research Fellowships.

A new study strongly indicates that the socioeconomic status of the family matters quite a lot in terms of increasing children's risk of repeatedly experiencing low mathematics achievement. UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. A recent study published in the Journal of Learning Disabilities suggests early screening and intervention may prevent persistent math difficulties (PMD) for at-risk children.

Average house prices in the South East, and especially London, rose even faster during 2014 (January to December) than in the same period of 2013, says new research.

Two University of Wisconsin-Madison professors have been selected for Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowships - an honor awarded on a competitive basis to promising young researchers in the early stages of their careers.

Computer chips' clocks have stopped getting faster. To keep delivering performance improvements, chipmakers are instead giving chips more processing units, or cores, which can execute computations in parallel.

When electronic states in materials are excited during dynamic processes, interesting phenomena such as electrical charge transfer can take place on quadrillionth-of-a-second, or femtosecond, timescales. Numerical simulations in real-time provide the best way to study these processes, but such simulations can be extremely expensive.

Aircraft designers and animators use different digital technologies to achieve the same goal: creating a three-dimensional image that can be manipulated. But a new method that links the two could vastly speed up how product designers create and simulate the performance of their products. Suddenly, we had a method that theoretically offered the manufacturing industry the flexibility the artists enjoy in subdivision Neil Dodgson The adventures of Woody and Buzz Lightyear have been charming children - and adults - worldwide for 20 years this year.