Science

Bats inspire 'micro air vehicle' designs

By exploring how creatures in nature are able to fly by flapping their wings, Virginia Tech researchers hope to apply that knowledge toward designing small flying vehicles known as "micro air vehicles" with flapping wings.
In Virginia Tech's study of fruit bat wings, the researchers used experimental measurements of the movements of the bats' wings in real flight, and then used analysis software to see the direct relationship between wing motion and airflow around the bat wing. They report their findings in the journal Physics of Fluids.
To give you an idea of the size of a fruit bat, it weighs roughly 30 grams and a single fully extended wing is about 17 x 9 cm in length, according to Tafti.
Among the biggest surprises in store for the researchers was how bat wings manipulated the wing motion with correct timing to maximise the forces generated by the wing.

Caesarean babies more likely to become  overweight as adults, analysis finds

Babies born by caesarean section are more likely to be overweight or obese as adults, according to a new analysis. The odds of being overweight or obese are 26 per cent higher for adults born by caesarean section than those born by vaginal delivery, the study found.
The finding, reported in the journal PLOS ONE, is based on combined data from 15 studies with over 38,000 participants from 10 countries.
The researchers, from Imperial College London, say there are good reasons why many women should have a C-section, but mothers choosing a caesarean should be aware that there might be long-term consequences for their children.
Around one in three to four births in England are by caesarean section, around twice as many as in 1990. In some countries, the rate is much higher, with 60 per cent of mothers in China and almost half in Brazil having the procedure.
Professor Neena Modi from the Department of Medicine at Imperial College London, the report's senior author, wrote: "…we need to understand the long-term outcomes of C-section in order to provide the best advice to women who are considering caesarean delivery.”

Google Glass could help stop emerging public health threats around the world

The much-talked-about Google Glass – the eyewear with computer capabilities – could potentially save lives, especially in isolated or far-flung locations, say scientists. They are reporting development of a Google Glass app that takes a picture of a diagnostic test strip and sends the data to computers, which then rapidly beam back a diagnostic report to the user. The information also could help researchers track the spread of diseases around the world. The study appears in the journal ACS Nano, a publication of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society.
"It's very important to detect emerging public health threats early, before an epidemic arises and many lives are lost," writes Aydogan Ozcan, PhD of the UCLA, "With our app for Google Glass and our remote computing and data analysis power, we can deliver a one-two punch – provide quantified biomedical test results for individual patients, plus analyze all those data to determine whether an outbreak is imminent."
Google Glass looks like a pair of eyeglasses without the lenses, but with a small rectangular transparent screen near the right eye that functions as a tiny computer screen. A mouse is built into the right arm of the frame.

What happens when the lightbulb turns on?

A team of researchers led by a Michigan State University neuroscientist has created a quick but reliable test that can measure a person's creativity from single spoken words.
While some believe ingenuity is spontaneous, MSU neuroscientist Jeremy Gray suspects there's a lot of hard work going on in the brain even when the proverbial light bulb turning on feels effortless. The findings from his latest research are published in the journal Behavior Research Methods.
For his latest research, 193 participants were shown a series of nouns and instructed to respond creatively with a verb in each case. The test took about two minutes.
For the noun "chair," for example, instead of answering with the standard verb "sit," a participant might answer "stand," as in to stand on a chair to change a light bulb. The researchers checked that the answers were in fact verbs and somehow related to the noun; excluding the few nonsensical responses made no difference to the results.
The results: Those who gave creative answers in the noun-verb test were indeed the most creative as measured by the more in-depth methods. This suggests the noun-verb test, or a future variation, could be successful by itself in measuring creativity.