John Hewitt

(Phys.org) —A new Kickstarter project called Velkess (Very Large Kinetic Energy Storage System) has recently gotten underway to bring an inexpensive flywheel to market. The project is headed by Bill Gray, who has taken a ...

(Phys.org) —The mammalian auditory system is one of the most sensitive detectors found in nature. Two kinds of cells, the inner and outer hair cells, work together to transduce mechanical vibrations into action potentials. ...

(Medical Xpress)—Gastric banding, a common surgery to reduce obesity, leaves much to be desired. Typically, the patient is left with a feeling of constant hunger. Stimulators implanted in the feeding centers of the brain, ...

(Medical Xpress)—At the same settings and light conditions, a camera will take the same picture every time. In contrast, a brain does not make perfect reconstructions of a stimulus. It appears instead to accumulate evidence ...

(Phys.org) —Graphene foams have been around now for a couple years. Their widespread application in everything from electronics and energy storage to substitutes for helium in balloons is still greatly anticipated. Researchers ...

(Medical Xpress)—In the epic series Star Wars, the mysterious energy field known simply as, the Force, was communicated by microscopic endosymbionts known as midichlorians. Their real world counterparts, the mitochondria, ...

(Medical Xpress)—Somewhere between the traditional classroom and old fashion home schooling, online learning has emerged as the dominant educational resource. Skyrocketing tuition, particularly at the college level, has sped ...

(Medical Xpress)—The smooth operation of the brain requires a certain robustness to fluctuations in its home within the body. At the same time, its extraordinary power derives from an activity structure poised at criticality. ...

(Phys.org) —A fundamental question in the evolution of animal body plans, is where did the head come from? In animals with a clear axis of right-left symmetry, the bilaterians, the head is where the brain is, at the anterior ...

(Medical Xpress)—Despite the well known inaccuracies of polygraph lie detectors, they remain in widespread, if selective, use by the criminal justice system. While they are far from truth machines, if the person who is interviewed ...

(Medical Xpress)—Neurons have developed elaborate mechanisms for transporting critical components, like transmitter-laden vesicles, down their axons to the synaptic terminations. An axon in a blue whale may be several meters ...

(Medical Xpress)—The ambitious and controversial Brain Activity Map (BAM), initiative instituted by a small group of researchers last year, has been steadily gaining momentum. Earlier this week, a proof-of-principle Zebrafish ...

(Medical Xpress)—Getting an MRI can be an uncomfortable experience, particularly for a 40-minute or longer scan. In the US at least, it is also quite expensive—the same kind of scan costing just over $100 in France, for example, ...