ScienceDaily: Strange Science News

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• New printable robots could self-assemble when heated
• Aircraft wings that change their shape in flight can help to protect the environment
• Glow-in-the-dark tool lets scientists find diseased bats
• Pleasant smells increase facial attractiveness
• Deception improved athletic performance
• NASA missions let scientists see moon's dancing tide from orbit
• There's more than one way to silence a cricket: Co-evolution of crickets who lost their chirp
• Think fast, robot: Algorithm that harnesses data from new sensor could make autonomous robots more nimble
• Hoosier cavefish: New species from caves of southern Indiana has an anus right behind its head
• Can software suffer? The complicated ethics of brain emulation
• Tastier low-fat products: Bacteria may improve low-fat products, help dairy producers

New printable robots could self-assemble when heated Posted: 30 May 2014 09:44 AM PDT New algorithms and electronic components could enable printable robots that self-assemble when heated. Printable robots — those that can be assembled from parts produced by 3-D printers — have long been a topic of research in Computer Science labs at MIT. Now researchers introduce a new wrinkle on the idea: bakable robots.

Aircraft wings that change their shape in flight can help to protect the environment Posted: 30 May 2014 06:26 AM PDT A top priority for any airline is to conserve as much fuel as possible – and this helps to protect the environment. A new project aims to reduce kerosene consumption by six percent, and integrating flexible landing devices into aircraft wings is one step towards that target.

Glow-in-the-dark tool lets scientists find diseased bats Posted: 29 May 2014 03:27 PM PDT Scientists working to understand the devastating bat disease known as white-nose syndrome now have a new, non-lethal tool to identify bats with WNS lesions -- ultraviolet, or UV, light. Millions of bats have died from this rapidly spreading disease and this new method allows for accurate detection of the disease without killing any more bats.

Pleasant smells increase facial attractiveness Posted: 29 May 2014 03:16 PM PDT Women's faces are rated as more attractive in the presence of pleasant odors, according to new research. In contrast, odor pleasantness had less effect on age evaluation. The findings suggest that perfumes and scented products may, to some extent, alter how people perceive one another.

Deception improved athletic performance Posted: 29 May 2014 12:40 PM PDT Researchers say a little deception caused cyclists in their 4K time trial to up their performance even after they realized they had been tricked. The findings support the idea that the brain plays a powerful role in how hard athletes push their bodies.

NASA missions let scientists see moon's dancing tide from orbit Posted: 29 May 2014 11:25 AM PDT Scientists combined observations from two NASA missions to check out the moon's lopsided shape and how it changes under Earth's sway -- a response not seen from orbit before. The lopsided shape of the moon is one result of its gravitational tug-of-war with Earth. The mutual pulling of the two bodies is powerful enough to stretch them both, so they wind up shaped a little like two eggs with their ends pointing toward one another. On Earth, the tension has an especially strong effect on the oceans, because water moves so freely, and is the driving force behind tides.

There's more than one way to silence a cricket: Co-evolution of crickets who lost their chirp Posted: 29 May 2014 11:24 AM PDT For most of us, crickets are probably most recognizable by the distinctive chirping sounds males make with their wings to lure females. But some crickets living on the islands of Hawaii have effectively lost their instruments and don't make their music anymore. Now researchers report that crickets living on different islands quieted their wings in different ways at almost the same time.

Think fast, robot: Algorithm that harnesses data from new sensor could make autonomous robots more nimble Posted: 29 May 2014 08:20 AM PDT One of the reasons we don't yet have self-driving cars and mini-helicopters delivering online purchases is that autonomous vehicles tend not to perform well under pressure. A system that can flawlessly parallel park at 5 mph may have trouble avoiding obstacles at 35 mph. Part of the problem is the time it takes to produce and interpret camera data. An autonomous vehicle using a standard camera to monitor its surroundings might take about a fifth of a second to update its location. That's good enough for normal operating conditions but not nearly fast enough to handle the unexpected.

Hoosier cavefish: New species from caves of southern Indiana has an anus right behind its head Posted: 29 May 2014 08:20 AM PDT A new eyeless cavefish is described from Indiana and named after the Indiana Hoosiers. It is the first new cavefish species described from the US in 40 years. Notably, it has an anus right behind its head, and the females brood their young in their gill chamber.

Can software suffer? The complicated ethics of brain emulation Posted: 27 May 2014 06:49 PM PDT Scientists may be years away from successfully emulating a human or animal brain for research purposes, but the significant -- and perhaps unexpected -- ethical challenges such work presents have been outlined in a thought-provoking article.

Tastier low-fat products: Bacteria may improve low-fat products, help dairy producers Posted: 27 May 2014 03:53 PM PDT Consumers may have more palatable low-fat products and milk producers a solution to an industry-wide problem through use of a unique strain of lactic acid bacteria, according researchers. Low-fat products tend to have inferior texture and flavor because removing fat makes their structure rubbery. After examining bacteria from the dairy environment for more than 15 years, the researchers found a strain that mimics fat.

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