Science

What factors affect how human touch perceives softness, like the feel of pressing your fingertip against a marshmallow, a piece of clay or a rubber ball? By exploring this question in detail, a team of engineers and psychologists at the University of California San Diego discovered clever tricks to design …

A fresh look at how to best determine dietary guidelines for vitamin E has produced a surprising new finding: Though the vitamin is fat soluble, you don’t have to consume fat along with it for the body to absorb it. “I think that’s remarkable,” said the study’s corresponding author, Maret …

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin today launched Frontera, the fastest supercomputer at any university and the fifth most powerful system in the world. TACC is also home to Stampede2, the second fastest supercomputer at any American university. The launch of Frontera solidifies …

Most people have experienced the hair-raising effect of rubbing a balloon on their head or the subtle spark caused by dragging socked feet across the carpet. Although these experiences are common, a detailed understanding of how they occur has eluded scientists for more than 2,500 years. Now a Northwestern University …

Golf ball-size clods of weathered crude oil originating from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon catastrophe could remain buried in sandy Gulf Coast beaches for decades, according to a new study by ecologists at Florida State University. In a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports, FSU Professor of Oceanography Markus Huettel and …

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today published “The Atlas of Surveillance: Southwestern Border Communities,” the first report from a new research partnership with the University of Nevada, Reno’s Reynolds School of Journalism. EFF and a team of students compiled profiles of six counties along the U.S.-Mexico border, outlining the types …

Perennial sea ice is rapidly melting in the Arctic, clearing the way for new shipping routes and fossil fuel extraction. This increased activity could have unexpected impacts on the natural chemistry of the polar region, according to researchers. A team of scientists from Penn State, the University of Michigan, Purdue …

While computers have become smaller and more powerful and supercomputers and parallel computing have become the standard, we are about to hit a wall in energy and miniaturization. Now, Penn State researchers have designed a 2D device that can provide more than yes-or-no answers and could be more brainlike than …

Inspired by octopuses, researchers have developed a structure that senses, computes and responds without any centralized processing – creating a device that is not quite a robot and not quite a computer, but has characteristics of both. The new technology holds promise for use in a variety of applications, from …

Many natural and synthetic chemical systems react and change their properties in the presence of certain kinds of light. These reactions can occur too quickly for ordinary instruments to see. For the first time, researchers adopted a novel technique to observe the high-speed reactions. A special kind of reaction observed …