Antonio Stradivari is universally recognized as the most famous violin maker in the world - if people can name one violin, it is his. During his life, he and his apprentices built more than a thousand violins, violas, cellos and other stringed instruments. The importance of Stradivari's work obviously lies in the craftsmanship, the quality of the materials used and the finishes on the instruments' surfaces. The sound of a violin is a result of the combination of the materials used e.g. wood species and varnishes, the construction technique and the skill of the maker.

So scientists have sought to duplicate that sound by reverse-engineering ways it could have been done.

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.

The robots have awaken. The awakening of the robots did not proceed as foretold in many different versions of computers becoming conscious, whatever that means, and then expressing love, committing suicide, or taking over the world in a Robopocalypse, and perhaps afterwards jumping the ledge by a grand ‘final switch-off’.

This morning I had a funny dream, and as I woke up at the end of it and watched the clock with the only eye I had managed to open, I realized it was not yet really time to wake up. On the other hand, I really liked the dream I had had: it was quite vivid and detailed, plus it lent an occasion for a blog post!

Hence I crawled out of the bed and reached for the nearest laptop in order to download the contents of my mind before it made room for something else and the dream got lost forever.

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.

The Solar Impulse airplane, brain-child airplane of Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg (who co-piloted the entire journey) that can fly day and night without fuel or polluting emissions, has ended its cross-country journey in New York City. Solar Impulse is an unique adventure that seeks to put some emotion into solar power and also a flying laboratory to find innovative technological solutions for today’s solar challenges.