Imagine having a discussion with Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein on the nature of the universe, where their 3-D, life-sized representations looked you in the eye, examined your body language, considered voice nuances and phraseology of your questions, then answered you in a way that is so real you would swear the images were alive.

This was an opening scene from an episode of the TV show "Star Trek" almost a decade and a half ago. A new research project between the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Central Florida in Orlando may soon make such imaginary conversations a reality.

Technology from computer games, animation and artificial intelligence provide the elements to make this happen.

Work completed by a visiting research professor at Rowan University, physics professors and a student from the institution shows that light is made of particles and waves, a finding that refutes a common belief held for about 80 years.

Shahriar S. Afshar, the visiting professor who is currently at Boston's Institute for Radiation-Induced Mass Studies (IRIMS), led a team, including Rowan physics professors Drs.

Whip spiders, considered by many to be creepy-crawly, are giving new meaning to the term touchy-feely.

In two species of whip spiders, or amblypygids, mothers caress their young with long feelers, siblings stick together until they reach sexual maturity, and all mix in social groups. This is surprising behavior for these arachnids long-thought to be purely aggressive and anti-social, according to a Cornell researcher.

Plants can do it: they simply grab carbon dioxide out of the air and covert it into biomass. In this process, known as photosynthesis, the plants use light as their energy source. Chemists would also like to be able to use CO2 as a carbon source for their synthetic reactions, but it doesn’t work just like that. A team headed by Markus Antonietti at the Max Planck Institute for Colloids and Interfaces has now taken an important step toward this goal. As described in the journal Angewandte Chemie, they have successfully activated CO 2 for use in a chemical reaction by using a special new type of metal-free catalyst: graphitic carbon nitride.

Employers would be better at keeping workers if they focused on why their employees want to stay rather than what kinds of things make them quit, according to researchers from the University of Washington and Truman State University.

Until recently, most research focused on why people leave jobs rather than why they choose to stay. In a review of the past 15 years of research on employee job satisfaction and voluntary turnover, the researchers examined not only why people quit but what makes workers stay in their current positions.

They found that the decision to quit one's job doesn't necessarily come from job dissatisfaction. Employees may have a plan to leave should something happen in their lives, such as a spouse getting a job in another town.

Probiotic supplements have been used around the world for at least half a century, but almost half (49 percent) of Americans indicate that they have never heard of them, according to a recent survey conducted by Harris Interactive® for Florastor®, the world’s top-selling probiotic, now being launched widely in the United States.

Derived from a Greek term meaning, "for life," probiotics are defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) as "live micro-organisms, which, when administered in proper amounts, confer a health benefit on the host."

Florastor, which utilizes a beneficial, clinically-studied form of a freeze-dried yeast called Saccharomyces boulardii (S.