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Speed Identified as the Best Predictor of Car Crashes
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Speed Identified as the Best Predictor of Car Crashes

Speeding is the riskiest kind of aggressive driving, according to a unique analysis of data from on-board devices in vehicles. Researchers at the University of Waterloo examined data from 28 million trips for possible links between four bad driving behaviours – speeding, hard braking, hard acceleration and hard cornering – and the likelihood of crashes....

A Stone Age Boat Building Site Has Been Discovered Underwater
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A Stone Age Boat Building Site Has Been Discovered Underwater

The Maritime Archaeological Trust has discovered a new 8,000 year old structure next to what is believed to be the oldest boat building site in the world on the Isle of Wight. Director of the Maritime Archaeological Trust, Garry Momber, said “This new discovery is particularly important as the wooden platform is part of a...

How to Prevent Robocalls
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How to Prevent Robocalls

Collecting a person’s phone number is not a hard task these days. They are shared on the internet through social media platforms and other online channels. With such personal information readily available, people are more vulnerable to invasive — and unwanted — robocalls. Nitesh Saxena, Ph.D., professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, College of Arts...

Storing Data in Music
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Storing Data in Music

Manuel Eichelberger and Simon Tanner, two Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) doctoral students, store data in music. This means, for example, that background music can contain the access data for the local Wi-Fi network, and a mobile phone’s built-in microphone can receive this data. “That would be handy in a hotel room,” Tanner says, “since guests...

Scientists Decode DNA Secrets of World’s Toughest Bean
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Scientists Decode DNA Secrets of World’s Toughest Bean

UC Riverside scientists have decoded the genome of black-eyed peas, offering hope for feeding Earth’s expanding population, especially as the climate changes. Understanding the genes responsible for the peas’ drought and heat tolerance eventually could help make other crops tougher too. Black-eyed peas are small beans with dark midsections. They’ve been a global dietary staple...

Decentralising Science May Lead to More Reliable Results
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Decentralising Science May Lead to More Reliable Results

Research results on drug-gene interactions are much less likely to be replicated if they are performed by hierarchical communities or close-knit groups of frequent collaborators who use similar methods, instead of independent groups of scientists using different methods, suggests a paper published last week in eLife. The findings may help improve the reliability of scientific results...

Bringing Human-Like Reasoning to Driverless Car Navigation
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Bringing Human-Like Reasoning to Driverless Car Navigation

With aims of bringing more human-like reasoning to autonomous vehicles, MIT researchers have created a system that uses only simple maps and visual data to enable driverless cars to navigate routes in new, complex environments. Human drivers are exceptionally good at navigating roads they haven’t driven on before, using observation and simple tools. We simply...

GRACE Data Contributes to Understanding of Climate Change
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GRACE Data Contributes to Understanding of Climate Change

The University of Texas at Austin team that led a twin satellite system launched in 2002 to take detailed measurements of the Earth, called the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), reports in the most recent issue of the journal Nature Climate Change on the contributions that their nearly two decades of data have made to our...