Master gunners tinkered with their gunpowder recipes in an attempt to balance blast, safety and cost in late medieval Europe – the time when guns began to dominate warfare. A new study found broad changes in the proportions of gunpowder’s three ingredients – charcoal, sulfur and saltpetre – in more than 20 gunpowder recipes dating […]

Every time we search something like ‘Why isn’t 11 pronounced onety-one’ or ‘Why isn’t there an E grade’ on Google, the algorithm behind the search engine runs through its corpus of data to find the answers which are most suitable for the question to give the user. This blog will explore the Google Pagerank system, […]

The proliferation of big data across domains, from banking to health care to environmental monitoring, has spurred increasing demand for machine learning tools that help organizations make decisions based on the data they gather. That growing industry demand has driven researchers to explore the possibilities of automated machine learning (AutoML), which seeks to automate the […]

In a rather unexpected move by the Nobel committee, this year’s prize in chemistry has been awarded to the two organic chemists who developed asymmetric organocatalysis more than two decades ago: Benjamin List from the Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung, Germany, and David MacMillan from Princeton University, US. Their work has shown that simple small organic molecules […]

Islands face exorbitant electricity costs when importing fossil fuels and are also among the most vulnerable regions to rising sea levels, drought and flooding. Innovative teamwork is putting them on the fast track to 100% energy independence – the green way. Carbon dioxide from power generation must be reduced to reach EU climate targets for […]

Scientists at Stanford University have discovered a surprising pattern in how life reemerges from cataclysm. Research published Oct. 6 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B shows the usual rules of body size evolution change not only during mass extinction, but also during subsequent recovery. Since the 1980s, evolutionary biologists have debated whether mass extinctions and the […]

Farming should be as high-yield as possible so it can be limited to relatively small areas, allowing much more land to be left as natural habitats while still meeting future food targets, according to a major new analysis of over a decade of research. Most species fare better under this “land sparing” approach than if […]

Readers of Eric Appel’s academic profile will note appointments in materials science, bioengineering and pediatrics, as well as fellowship appointments in the ChEM-H institute for human health research and the Woods Institute for the Environment. While the breadth of these appointments does not leap to mind as being particularly consistent, the connections quickly emerge for those who […]

People with rapid eye movement (REM) sleep behavior disorder act out their dreams. While sleeping safely in bed, for example, they might throw up their arms to catch an imaginary ball, or try to run from an illusory assailant. Such actions are more than just a nuisance. People with the disorder have a 50 to […]

The amount of data produced each year by scientific user facilities such as those at national labs or government organizations can range up to several billion gigabytes per year. This massive amount of data generation has now begun to exceed researchers’ capacity to effectively parse this data in order to accomplish their scientific goals — a supersized […]