London University

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Bacteria could make electricity out of the leftovers in your fridge 

If food waste was a country, it’d be the number three global greenhouse gas emitter — that’s according to the United Nations. 

So is there a way to make good use of all the 1.5 billion tons of food waste we create each year? 

Scientists, including UC Davis graduate student Ryan Dowdy, are figuring out how to turn all of this wasted food into electricity — and more specifically, Dowdy is using bacteria to do so. 

He grows bacteria in fuel cells (which are like batteries, except they don’t store energy, they convert it.) When bacteria grow in this oxygen-free and conductive environment, they produce electricity as part of their natural respiration process. And, as long as the bacteria are fed biodegradable organic waste, they will efficiently and continuously generate electricity. 

Curious about what other graduate students are working on at the University of California? Check out the 2016 Grad Slam competition to watch them summarize years of research in under three minutes. (Without the jargon!)

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All ants on deck!

By working together, social insects, such as ants, achieve tasks that are beyond the reach of single individuals. A striking example is “self-assembly,” a process in which ants link their bodies to form structures such as chains, ladders, walls or rafts.

Researchers have found a species of ant that clusters together to form rafts to survive floods, exhibits memory and repeatedly occupies the same position during raft formation.

The team of scientists, including Jessica Purcell, an assistant professor of entomology at the University of California, Riverside, focused on Formica selysi, an ant species found in floodplains in central and southern Europe.

They believe this is the first time memory has been demonstrated in so-called self-assemblages.

“These elaborate rafts are some of the most visually stunning examples of cooperation in ants,” Purcell said. “They are just plain cool. Although people have observed self-assemblages in the past, it’s exciting to make new strides in understanding how individuals coordinate to build these structures.”

[humanoidhistory]

Ranger 9 crashes into the Moon, March 24, 1965. 

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What was I going to say? (The science of brain farts)

Have you ever been on the verge of saying something when the phone rang and you forgot what you wanted to say?

Brain farts happen to the best of us. So what causes that annoying little disturbance to your thought?

A collaborative study between researchers at UC San Diego and Oxford University offers an explanation of how this happens. Their research focused on the brain’s “stopping system,” known as the subthalamic nucleus (STN).

The STN helps us when we’re in situations where we quickly need to stop (like when you’re turning a corner and realize you’re about to run into someone). Their study suggests that this motor stopping system might also be responsible for derailing your train of thought.

“An unexpected event appears to clear out what you were thinking,” UC San Diego neuroscientist Adam Aron said. “The radically new idea is that, just as the brain’s stopping mechanism is involved in stopping what we’re doing with our bodies, it might also be responsible for interrupting and flushing out our thoughts.”

In the study, they asked participants to memorize a string of letters. The researchers then played an unexpected subtle sound like a birdsong or cellphone vibration.

They found that the more those neurons activated following an unexpected subtle sound, the harder it was for participants to recall the string of letters.

A possible future line of investigation, Aron said, is to see if the STN and associated circuitry plays a role in conditions characterized by distractibility, like Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.  

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Traveling to Mars (safely AND quickly) with plasma rockets

There has been quite a bit of hype about getting people to Mars. But traveling 35 million miles to the red planet will require a new breed of rockets that are much more powerful and efficient than traditional chemical-fueled rockets.

It takes *A LOT* of fuel to get into space. The Saturn V, which launched spacecraft to the moon, required fuel tanks that were taller than the Statue of Liberty. Traveling to Mars, which is 200 times farther than the moon, means that we would need to build an even bigger rocket that can carry 200 times more fuel — a highly impractical quest. 

So NASA researchers are working on a new kind of rocket with electric thrusters that can travel at high speed using less fuel. These plasma rockets can get spacecraft to the moon with one-tenth the tank of fuel used by Saturn V, and are capable of cutting a risky trip to Mars down from two years to less than two months. 

Even though plasma rockets are ideal for long-term spaceflight, they do have some shortcomings.

To create plasma, a gas-like matter that’s as hot as the sun, radio waves are used to heat a gas propellant. The problem is that during the heating process, charged ion particles are expelled, causing damage to the thruster’s walls that could potentially lead to a catastrophe.

So what if there was a way that the wall could repair itself?

Gary Li, a UCLA aerospace engineering grad student, is figuring out a way to do just that. In the video below, he explains how his research could help humans travel safely and quickly to Mars:

[mypubliclands]

MAY THE FOURTH BE WITH YOU!

Once again, we celebrate May 4th or Star Wars Day with photos from Imperial Sand Dunes Recreation Area in California. For years, Star Wars enthusiasts have ventured to the BLM’s Imperial Sand Dunes to visit the filming location of the opening scenes of Return of the Jedi.  The Imperial Sand Dunes are the largest dune mass in California.  Formed by windblown sands of ancient Lake Cahuilla, the dunes create an out-of-this-world landscape ideal for Hollywood film backdrops and are known as an off-roading mecca.

CLICK HERE to learn more about the Imperial Sand Dunes.

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How the heck do you measure happiness?

When asked if they’re happy, political conservatives are more likely to say yes than liberals — something commonly referred to as the “ideological happiness gap.”

But let’s get a little philosophical for a second: if you say that you’re happy, are you really happy?

Peter Ditto, who leads @ucirvine’s Hot Cognition Lab, has made a career of studying human judgment and biases. His lab is particularly interested in self-enhancement: the tendency to think of oneself in overly positive terms, particularly when compared to others.

For example, on employee self-evaluations, nearly everyone rates themselves as above average. Ditto and his team found that the same is true with happiness: Most people think that they’re happier than the average person.

“There is no perfect, objective way to measure someone’s happiness, which is why most scientific research on happiness relies on self-reports,” said Sean Wojcik, Ditto’s former grad student and a research scientist at @upworthy.

In a paper published in Science last year, Wojcik wanted to see if conservatives actually experienced greater feelings of happiness than liberals, or if they are more self-enhancing. Are they just more likely to exaggerate their own happiness? For his research, he used methods that were less prone to self-enhancement bias, including some big data approaches.

In one study, he looked for happiness-related behavior among members of a clearly divided group: Congress. Looking both at positive and negative emotional language over 18 years in the Congressional Record – more than 432 million words in all – Wojcik found that Democrats used a significantly higher frequency of positive words in 17 out of the 18 years.

Words are nice, but a photo is worth a thousand of those. Analyzing smiles from photos of members of Congress, Wojcik found that increased conservatism was associated with a decrease in smiling. It also predicted significantly less intense facial action in the muscles around the eyes, known as an indicator of genuine happiness. Liberal politicians, on the other hand, tended to more smile more intensely and more genuinely (what’s known as the Duchenne smile). 

Image: US News & World Reports

Moving outside the political sphere, Wojcik analyzed nearly 50,000 Twitter posts from self-identified liberal and conservative members of the general public. Mirroring the other studies, posts by conservatives were significantly less likely to contain positive emotion words and even happy emoticons.

But let’s get philosophical once more: If you “display” happiness, is that the same thing as feeling happy?

Are liberals truly happier than conservatives?

“No,” said Ditto. “I don’t think the two sides are very different in happiness – they just manifest it in different ways.” The researchers recommend using multiple ways to measure happiness (self-reports and behavioral measures). Using a single method will likely lead to an oversimplified account of not only who is happier, but also what it means to be happy at all.

Read more: Do your politics make you happy?

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Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ)

One of Brazil’s biggest government colleges, the Universidade Federal Do Rio De Janeiro (UFRJ) has 157 undergrad and 580 graduate projects to suit its 56,000 understudies and 9,300 staff individuals. It additionally has seven exhibition halls, including the National Museum of Brazil in which a large number of UFRJ’s scientists, workplaces and labs are housed.

The National Museum offers graduate courses in subjects, for example, human studies, humanism, plant science, topography, fossil science and zoology. Alongside these subjects, the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro offers courses in wellbeing sciences, innovation, characteristic and numerical sciences, legitimate and monetary studies, logic and humanities and dialects and expressions.

Taking after college developments in the twentieth century, a whole arrangement of islands on Guanabara Bay were converged to make Fundão Island. The island now has UFRJ’s organization, a few of its schools and examination focuses and is the fundamental grounds for the college – driving numerous Brazilians to allude to UFRJ basically as Fundão.

UFRJ is positioned nineteenth in the QS University Rankings: BRICS, with especially solid scores for scholastic notoriety, global workforce and rate of staff with a PhD. It doesn’t exactly coordinate either USP or UNICAMP regarding exploration production rates – yet does appear to be delivering research that is having an effect, getting a more grounded score than UNICAMP for references per paper. Like other top colleges in Brazil, UFRJ contrasts less positively and different BRICS establishments in the matter of personnel to-understudy proportion and admission of universal underst

[bestuniversitiesever]

Fu Jen Catholic University

Fu Jen Catholic University  is a private expansive school built up by the Benedictines at the requesting of the Holy See in Beijing in 1926, and was re-situated up in 1961 in Taiwan with the joint tries of the Society of Jesus, Society of Divine Word and the Regional Bishops’ Conference.

The school typifies 11 schools with an understudy collection of more than 25,000. The school is especially known for its educational enormity in thinking, sinology, outside vernaculars, mass correspondence, visual portrayal, law, organization, physical direction, prescription, associated science, and planning. Fu Jen is one of amazing self-authorized schools in Taiwan. The school was in like manner regarded the Best International Quality Assurance Prize by APQN (the Asia-Pacific Quality Network), the College of Management was approve by AACSB, the School of Medicine by TMAC (Taiwan Medical Accreditation Council), and the Department of Electrical Engineering, Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering by IEET. Graduated class of Fu Jen are consistently assessed as the most supported by organizations.

Since its starting, Fu Jen Catholic University has savored the experience of a worldwide character. It has more than 300 assistant schools all over the place all through the world, and has more than 2,000 understudies from abroad.

[bestuniversitiesever]

Korea University

Korea University gets a handle on the troubles of the 21st Century by building new platforms across over old points of confinement. These augmentations join new informational ventures that extend distinctive majors and interdisciplinary studies; indispensable relationship with private and open R&D centers that pool resources and development inventive examination; and new overall associations that unite Korea University understudies with understudies, staff and activities of other driving schools far and wide. Powerful hobbies in new research workplaces, information systems and base give these augmentations the quality and flexibility to extend far into the next century. These frameworks point to a singular destination - finishing the University mission of educating “insightful individuals, all things considered.” By “scholarly individuals, all things considered” I mean men and women immersed with better data and the moral valor than set their academic aptitudes to work in the journey for continuing responses for bona fide issues. In a universe of predictable change, no association can thrive by simply keeping up the standard. Our tries to move past the formally strong reputation of our University reflects a 95-year tradition of unending attempt and repeat.

[scuolaitalia-blog]

Rhodes University (South Africa)

Rhodes  is the most settled out of the four schools in this region. It is an open investigation school, with an enrolment of more than7,000 understudies each year – this for the most part little affirmation means it’s the principle South African school classed as “little” in the QS University Rankings: BRICS. Essentially under segment of understudies live on grounds, with opportunities to welcome the various expressions and society offerings of Grahamstown and what’s more its two greatest yearly festivals – the National Arts Festival in January and the surely understood SciFest Africa in the first term of the education.

[scuolaitalia-blog]

Massey University

Massey University developed in 1927, Massey University is one of the more energetic schools in New Zealand, however has immediately created to wind up one of the country’s greatest. It has around 35,000 understudies enrolled, of which just under half are considering through division learning. Those focusing on grounds are spread over the North Island at the school’s three essential grounds, in Albany , Wellington and Palmerston North. Massey University is situated 317 in the QS World University Rankings 2015-16.The other three schools in New Zealand.

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University Of Canterbury

School of Canterbury Also arranged on the South Island, in the island’s greatest city of Christchurch, the University of Canterbury is New Zealand’s third-most shocking situated school at 211th on the planet. It was set up in 1873, which makes it the second-most prepared propelled instruction association in the country. Around 15,000 understudies are chosen here, with courses offered in subjects including expressions, business, building, expressive expressions, officer administration, wellbeing sciences, law, music, social work, talk and vernacular pathology, science, sports controlling and teaching.

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University of McMaster (Canada)

McMaster is a full-organization school. With settled qualities in social protection, outlining, business,social sciences, science, and humanities research and direction, the University offers both understudies and instructors empowering and excellent open entryways for investigation, preparing, and composed exertion. With a long-standing reputation as Canada’s “most innovative” school, McMaster has led different undertakings that have changed how instructors train and understudies learn. Issue based-learning, initiated at McMaster, has now spread across over North America as a favored method for preparing school understudies.

[yesscuolazoo-blog]

West University of Timisoara

The fourth Romanian college which positions among the world’s main 800 is the West University of Timisoara. Set up in 1962, it is the most youthful of Romania’s universally positioned foundations. The college is sorted out in 11 resources, showing courses in Mathematics and Informatics, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Geography, History, Theology, Psychology, Economics, Arts, Physical Education, Politics, Philosophy and Law. A standout amongst the most outstanding graduated class of the college is Herta Müller, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2009

[yesscuolazoo-blog]

Babes-Bolyai University Babes-Bolyai Universityis the largest Romanian higher education institution. It was established in 1919, but underwent a profound process of transformation in 1959. The institution teaches about 40,000 students, of which more than 700 are international students. Babes-Bolyai University also features among the world’s top 800 universities. Named after prominent Romanian scientist Victor Babeș and Hungarian mathematician János Bolyai, it is a leading research university with 21 faculties. The higher education institution offers courses in Romanian, Hungarian, German, English and French.

[yesscuolazoo-blog]

Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee (IIT Roorkee)

Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee (IIT Roorkee)Established in 1847 as a school of structural building, the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee (IIT Roorkee) turned into an IIT in 2001. The college is currently positioned 43rd in the BRICS positioning and 92nd in Asia, and has around 8,000 understudies. Situated in the city of Roorkee in Uttarakhand in northern India, IIT Roorkee concentrates on science and building projects and also offering humanities, sociologies and administration degrees. IIT Roorkee gloats three ‘focuses of perfection’, devoted to nanotechnology, transportation frameworks and fiasco moderation and administration.

IIT Roorkee highlights in eight subjects in the current year’s subject rankings; as you would expect, it performs best for building, science and innovation disciplines.