New research by an Arabian prince could see the millions of date stones disposed of in Saudi Arabia each year instead used to decrease air and water pollution.  Abdulrahman Bandar Al-Saud, 34, is studying for a PhD at Queen’s University Belfast’s School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering.

His research is based on the premise that date stones can be used to develop activated carbon with a high adsorption capacity.   Activated carbon is a form of the element that has been processed to make it extremely porous with a very large surface area available for adsorption.

European researchers say they have developed the most advanced spontaneous language understanding (SLU) system ever devised for both Polish and Italian languages.  That's because it is also the first one, according to the Luna project behind the work.

Spontaneous language understanding is far more advanced than the traditional interactive voice response (IVR) systems that people may already be familiar with. In traditional IVRs, the user is required to answer questions with specific words or short sentences proposed by the systems.

But with SLU, language systems are designed to respond to spontaneous speech: real conversations between people that include the sentence fillers and pause words like ‘um’ and ‘er’.

Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger's heroic Hudson River landing was a good reminder that a twenty pound bird at 200 miles per hour is not so different from a bowling ball shot from a cannon. The results range from minor dents to Flight 1549's disabled engines to the damage below: double-lapped, 1/16” reinforced aluminum totally blown through, and feathers clear to the cockpit.

Half a mile underground is probably the last place you might expect to be able to observe atmospheric phenomena. If you knew about the MINOS experiment, however, you might think otherwise. MINOS, which stands for Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search, was built to detect particles originating far away but of terrestrial origin.

Recently, researchers have noticed that the detectors at MINOS occasionally detect particles from the atmosphere, and that these detections correlate with weather patterns in the high atmosphere.

Did a catastrophic flood of biblical proportions occur, as stated in the story of Noah's Ark?    If so, it may have been the shores of the Black Sea that were drowned 9,500 years ago, wiping out early Neolithic settlements around its perimeter.

Imaging systems, artificial intelligence and computer programs for facial recognition could get a boost by  work from Dr. Adrian Dyer of Monash University,  one of Australia's leading bee experts - he says his latest research shows that honeybees can learn to recognize human faces even when seen from different viewpoints.

The findings show that despite the highly constrained neural resources of the insects (their brains are 0.01 per cent the size of the human brain) their ability has evolved so that they're able to process complex visual recognition tasks.

A recent theory of aging says that caloric restriction may do the trick but the research is inconsistent; the mice in the most promising studies were weaned that way, something unlikely to happen in human children.    New research says even those studies may not be entirely accurate and that for lean mice – and therefore lean humans, if prior mouse studies were to be taken at face value  – caloric restrictions as an anti-aging strategy may be a pointless, frustrating and even dangerous exercise.

But for fat mice, dieting makes sense and will extend life, the researchers say.   That goes for people as well.

The movement of facial skin and muscles around the mouth plays an important role not only in the way the sounds of speech are made, but also in the way they are heard according to a study by scientists at Haskins Laboratories, a Yale-affiliated research laboratory. 

"How your own face is moving makes a difference in how you 'hear' what you hear," said first author Takayuki Ito, a senior scientist at Haskins Laboratories.

When, Ito and his colleagues used a robotic device to stretch the facial skin of "listeners" in a way that would normally accompany speech production they found it affected the way the subjects heard the speech sounds. 

To prolong the shelf life of foods, manufacturers often add hydrogen to natural oils, a process called hydrogenation. But hydrogenation also results in the production of trans fats, which have adverse health effects such as raising bad cholesterol and increasing the risk for coronary heart diseases.   Trans fats are found in vegetable shortenings, some margarines, crackers, cookies and snacks. Health authorities worldwide recommend that people reduce their consumption of trans fats.

UC Riverside chemists have designed a catalyst  (a substance that accelerates a chemical reaction) that allows hydrogenated oils to be made while minimizing the production of trans fats.

The American Peanut Council continues to work with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to investigate which products may be affected by a manufacturer's recall due to salmonella contamination. It advises consumers that at this time, there is no indication that any jars of peanut butter sold in retail stores are linked to the recall by Georgia-based Peanut Corporation of America (PCA).

While none of this product was sold at retail to the general public, some of the peanut butter and peanut paste manufactured by PCA is used as ingredients in other products.