Previous studies have shown that when a drug study was funded by the company that made that drug, the results might be biased in favor of that drug. New research published in the British Medical Journal shows that, at least for blood pressure drugs, studies are now much less likely to have biased results but still tend to have overly positive conclusions favoring the company's products.

The authors call on editors and peer reviewers to scrutinize the conclusions of these studies to ensure that they contain an unbiased interpretation of the results.

The technology that makes a cell phone vibrate is the same technology that provides more natural movements to prosthetic limbs. A University of Houston research team is working on recreating and enhancing this technological effect, which, if successful, could result in better prosthetic movements and also provide instant electrical power for soldiers and others through the simple act of walking.

Pradeep Sharma, a UH mechanical engineering professor, is leading the team to create a “piezoelectric on steroids.” Piezoelectricity is the ability of some materials to generate an electric charge when placed under stress. This pioneering technology already is more useful than many people realize.

Research announced this week by a team of U.S. and Japanese geoscientists may help explain why part of the seafloor near the southwest coast of Japan is particularly good at generating devastating tsunamis, such as the 1944 Tonankai event, which killed at least 1,200 people. The findings will help scientists assess the risk of giant tsunamis in other regions of the world.

Geoscientists from The University of Texas at Austin and colleagues used a commercial ship to collect three-dimensional seismic data that reveals the structure of Earth’s crust below a region of the Pacific seafloor known as the Nankai Trough. The resulting images are akin to ultrasounds of the human body.

University of Essex scientists Dr John Woods and Steve Fitz have been awarded funding to create an intelligent plug which can monitor electricity use.

The two scientists, of the Department of Computing and Electronic Systems, have been awarded £90,000 by Carbon Connections to create a device indistinguishable from current plugs, which details individual power use and can be connected to a central, controlling system within the home.

Inside each plug will be a power meter, a microcontroller and a wireless transceiver which will relay information back to the central point.

Sea Launch has resumed its countdown for the launch of the Thuraya-3 mobile communications satellite, with liftoff now planned for Sunday, Nov. 18, at 7:37 am PST (15:37 GMT).

The Sea Launch Commander is positioned alongside the Odyssey Launch
Platform, at the launch site at 154 degrees West Longitude, on the equator. A day before liftoff, the launch team will erect the Zenit-3SL rocket on the launch pad and perform final tests on the launch system and the spacecraft before starting the terminal countdown.

During final preparations for liftoff, the platform will be evacuated, with all personnel safely positioned on the ship, four miles from the platform.

A 110 million-year-old dinosaur that had a mouth that worked like a vacuum cleaner, hundreds of tiny teeth and nearly translucent skull bones will be unveiled Thursday, Nov. 15, at the National Geographic Society.

Found in the Sahara by National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Paul Sereno, paleontologist and professor at the University of Chicago, the dinosaur is a plant eater known as Nigersaurus taqueti. Originally named by Sereno and his team in 1999 with only a few of its distinctive bones in hand, Nigersaurus has emerged as an anatomically bizarre dinosaur.