A high capacity video surveillance may not be of much use if not accompanied by the necessary work of image analysis. Without this work, one should run with the risk that suspicious acts are overlooked, or they may raise false alarms.

The cost of knowing what is happening is very high. “The problem now is that we can not put more cameras, the problem is to observe what they show is very expensive and error prone,” said Paul Cohen, head of the department of computer science at the University of Arizona.

To help mitigate some of these limitations, Cohen and his collaborators are working to build an intuitive, not only to capture video, but also to detect suspicious human behaviors. Read the rest of this entry »

Internal movements of the guts of caterpillars when they are moved to help move. So reveals a study, to be useful for biology but also for engineering, because the finding may inspire designs of robots made from soft and flexible, able to crawl around corners with the same ease that characterizes the caterpillars.

The work has been conducted by a team of biologists and engineers, including Jake Socha, Virginia Institute of Technology (Virginia Tech), Michael Simon and Barry Trimmer, both from the Department of Biology, Tufts University. Read the rest of this entry »

A team of experts has produced flexible, transparent film of carbon atoms that have great potential for a new class of solar cells.

Organic photovoltaic cells (OPV) have been proposed as a means of obtaining cheap energy because of its ease of production, light weight, and compatibility with flexible substrates. Now, the new technique will enable progress toward an innovative design of OPV cells has important advantages, particularly in the area of physical flexibility. Read the rest of this entry »

The discovery of a major Australian cave of 15 million years old, home to ancient fossil bones of animals, has revealed almost the entire life cycle of a large prehistoric marsupial, like a wombat, from its infant stage to old age.

In what is an unprecedented discovery, a team of researchers from the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, has been unearthed in the cave floor very well preserved fossils of the extinct marsupial known as Nimbadon lavarackorum, along with the remains of other ancient animals. Read the rest of this entry »

For years, researchers from many parts of the world have attempted to genetically alter mosquitoes so they can not infect humans with malaria. These efforts achieved only partial success because they were still capable of transmitting the pathogen causing the disease, although to a lesser extent.

For the first time, a team of entomologists at the University of Arizona has been genetically altering a mosquito so as to be completely useless as a vector of malaria. Researchers hope to one day replace wild mosquitoes emerged from a population of individuals handled and reared in the laboratory, which can not act as a vector, i.e., it is unable to transmit the parasite that causes malaria, one-celled organism Plasmodium. Read the rest of this entry »

A team of divers has begun to map some of the 25 freshwater lakes White Face in Belize, which was of major importance to the ancient Maya. Divers have found fossilized remains of animals, pottery shards, and explored the largest lagoon, a huge underwater cave.

This project, led by anthropologist Lisa Lucero of the University of Illinois, is the first of what Lucero expected to be a series of dives in the lakes of the southern lowlands of the Maya in central Belize. Divers will assess the feasibility of carrying out an archaeological dig at the bottom of the ponds, some of which are over 60 meters deep. Read the rest of this entry »

A light emitting diode (LED) is an electronic semiconductor component. Current flows through the diode in the forward direction; it emits light, infrared radiation (as infrared light emitting diode) or ultraviolet radiation from a semiconductor material and doping dependent on wavelength.

A LED (Light Emitting Diode) is a new concept in lighting which has incredible energy efficiency, i.e., the amount of energy needed to light is much smaller than even the outbreaks Halogen savers that are known today. Read the rest of this entry »

Our personalities play an important role in every aspect of our lives, from hobbies to friendships and even whom to marry. And besides, as evidenced by Jeffery Mondak research, summarized in a recent book, our personalities also play an important role in our political behavior.

The findings of Jeffery Mondak in “Personality and the Foundations of Political Behavior” published by Cambridge University Press, from more than 13 years of study of the intersection between psychology and politics, and based on his own research and those of other experts.

It is only natural that personality contributes to shaping our political beliefs and our political behavior, but, as noted Mondak, this relationship has been largely ignored as a topic of study. Read the rest of this entry »

An international team of geoscientists have discovered significant geological differences between two segments of a fault that could explain why the Sumatra tsunami of December 2004 was far more devastating than a second tsunami generated by an earthquake three months later. This could help explain what has become an impenetrable mystery to researchers of earthquakes.

The team of experts from the University of Southampton in the UK, the University of Texas at Austin (United States) and the Agency for Assessment and Application of Technology in Indonesia and the Institute for Science Indonesia carried out the research. Read the rest of this entry »

Electrons are negatively charged elementary particles. They form a covering around the nuclei of atoms and ions. This or something similar is what you can read in textbooks. Soon, however, this information may have to be modified. The reason is that many physicists believe that the electrons can have a permanent electric dipole moment. One way to check is now being developed. Read the rest of this entry »