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(Phys.org) —Everyone knows what drones are, right?  They have gained visibility for use in military and monitoring applications, but have a wide variety of more ‘friendly’, useful applications here at home, such as helping understand the condition of our transportation infrastructure. They are flying machines, operated for a given purpose either autonomously or remotely, that have uses well beyond their better-known reputation.

In a paper published in this week’s Online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine identify a key gene receptor and signaling pathway essential to maintaining human embryonic stem cells in an undifferentiated state.

Americans aged 34 to 46 with children at home rate their life satisfaction at higher levels than those without children at home, according to a report by Princeton University and Stony Brook University published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. However, the researchers say that factors such as higher educational attainment, higher income, better health and religiosity all enhance life satisfaction and that, once these are taken into account, parents and nonparents have similar levels of life satisfaction.

Insects represent remarkable diversity and have adapted to all sorts of ecological nooks and crannies. For example, they have taste receptors—novel proteins—with which they taste chemicals and make important choices about not only foods but also mates and where to deposit their eggs

Press “1” if you’re tired of being on hold! Nobody likes to wait, but since customer service can’t be packaged to sit on a shelf ready when we need it, everybody has to “get in line” for help from banks, credit card companies, stores, healthcare or tech support. These days, that usually means dialing a call center somewhere in the world, which makes understanding caller patience increasingly important.

Applications in imaging and sensing typically involve the emission of light at a different wavelength than the excitation, or “secondary light emission.” The interpretation of resonant secondary light emission in terms of fundamental processes has been controversial for 40 years. In this work, researchers found that resonant electronic Raman scattering and resonant fluorescence may both be useful descriptions of the secondary emission.

A multi-disciplinary team from the University of Pennsylvania have published in Nature Methods a first-of-its-kind way to isolate RNA from live cells in their natural tissue microenvironment without damaging nearby cells. This allows the researchers to analyze how cell-to-cell chemical connections influence individual cell function and overall protein production.

(Phys.org) —Inventor Nikola Tesla imagined the technology to transmit energy through thin air almost a century ago, but experimental attempts at the feat have so far resulted in cumbersome devices that only work over very small distances. But now, Duke University researchers have demonstrated the feasibility of wireless power transfer using low-frequency magnetic fields over distances much larger than the size of the transmitter and receiver.

Entrepreneurs looking for risk capital to fund growth will need to get to grips with the rise of the angel group, according to the latest research by leading academics into business angel activity. In a joint project undertaken by the universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, the growth in the number of managed angel groups signifies a maturing of the angel investment market from a fragmented, anonymous and largely invisible activity in which angels invested on their own or with a few friends to one characterised by formal groups or syndicates of angels investing together

Lithium batteries, with their exceptional ability to store power per a given weight, have been a major focus of research to enable use in everything from portable electronics to electric cars. Now researchers at MIT and Brookhaven National Laboratory have found a whole new avenue for such research: the use of disordered materials, which had generally been considered unsuitable for batteries.