The uncanny valley has a new hill to climb - our ability to consider it human-like depends on its role in our lives, say a group of scholars.

 And roles are also important in positive feelings. Designers and engineers assign robots specific roles, such as servant, caregiver, assistant or playmate and the scholars analyzing  60 interactions between college students and Nao, a social robot developed by Aldebaran Robotics, a French company specializing in humanoid robots, found that people expressed more positive feelings toward a robot that would take care of them than toward a robot that needed care.

Standard atomic weights for chemical elements are not quite as constant as you might think - along with the speed of light and the attraction of gravity there are some exceptions. Hold on to your Newtonian hat and prepare for the possibility of elementary nuances.

Anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa are psychological disorders characterized by extreme eating behavior and distorted body image – both have few proven effective treatments.

A new paper suggests that the altered function of neural circuitry contributes to restricted eating in anorexia and overeating in bulimia.

The study used functional MRI to test this neurocircuitry by measuring the brain response to sweet tastes in 28 women who had recovered from either anorexia or bulimia.
Relative to a cohort of 14 women who had never suffered from either disorder, those recovered from anorexia had significantly diminished, and those recovered from bulimia, significantly elevated responses to the taste of sucrose in the right anterior insula.

A new drought-protecting chemical shows potential for crop protection during periods of dry weather.
A research team led by Sean Cutler, a plant cell biologist at the University of California, Riverside, has found a new drought-protecting chemical that shows high potential for becoming a powerful tool for crop protection in the new world of extreme weather.

Named “quinabactin” by the researchers, the chemical mimics a naturally occurring stress hormone in plants that helps the plants cope with drought conditions.

Birds in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta of western Alaska have been discovered having low-pathogenic avian influenza viruses with Eurasian genes, supporting the hypothesis that the area is a potential point of entry for foreign animal diseases such as the more highly pathogenic H5N1 strain, according to U.S. Geological Survey scientists.

The 400-mile IndyCar race July 7th at Pocono Raceway will be the first open-wheeled event at the 2.5-mile, triangular-shaped track since 1989.

Pocono Raceway's triangular design, known as "The Tricky Triangle," makes it truly unique. Pocono is the America's only professional race circuit with three turns, three different radii and three variant degrees of banking.