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Food scientist Hang Xiao of the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently received a four-year, $491,220 grant to study the biochemical fate of nanoemulsion-based food delivery systems in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract, hoping to re-shape them and enhance the absorption of beneficial food components encapsulated in delivery systems.

(Phys.org) —Researchers in China have captured, for the first time, an instance of ball lightning, on digital video along with spectrographs. The accidental capture, detailed by the team in a paper they’ve had published in Physical Review Letters, offers proof that ball lightning does exist and because it was captured via spectrographs also, offers clues as to how it came to exist.

It seems paradoxical that a preference for which of two houses to buy could depend on another, inferior, house – but researchers at the University of Bristol have identified that seemingly irrelevant alternatives can, and should, influence choices. Even more remarkable is the finding that optimal choices can violate the principle of transitivity: it can be best to choose A from A or B, and choose B from B or C, but choose C from A or C.

A relatively unknown, hidden, artificial stream, called a “flume,” located in the basement of the Idaho Water Center at Broadway and Front streets in downtown Boise is the site of a collaborative research initiative by scientists from Boise State University and the University of Idaho (UI). The project is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

(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.