Over the last few months, water has become the focus of debate in the United States as ugly details of the Flint water crisis come to light. The problem of water contamination is ubiquitous global. Some 2 million tons of sewage and other effluent drain into the world's waters, according to the United Nations. To explore the issue, students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and New York University (NYU) explored how microbes can both contribute to and diminish water pollution.
If you've ever had to cook dinner, prepare for the next day's work meeting, while also listen to a friend complain over the phone, then you know all too well the importance of multitasking. But what's actually going on inside our brains that allows for us to strategically focus on one task over another? That's remained largely a mystery, at least until recently. Earlier this week, researchers at New York University published a paper in the journal Nature saying they identified one small region of the brain—the thalamic reticular nucleus (TRN)—as the one that controls our ability to multitask.
Screams can jar you from a deep sleep, instantly making you feel panicked even if you were in the deepest state of relaxation. Now researchers from New York University understand why screams affect us the way they do: the frequency of the sound changes very quickly, which awakens parts of the brain associated with fear and panic.
Humans have been engineering yeast "for thousands of years," says Jef Boeke, a researcher with New York University's medical centerwho is one of the world's top yeast biology experts. At first, I thought he was exaggerating. Yeast has been ubiquitous in science labs for decades now, studied in every possible way, like a microscopic lab rat, and I thought Boeke was referring to that.
Facebook users upload 350 million photos onto the social network every day, far beyond the ability of human beings to comprehensively look at, much less analyze. And so that’s one big reason the company just hired New York University (NYU) machine learning expert Yann LeCun, an eminent practitioner of an artificial intelligence (AI) technique known as “deep learning.” As director of Facebook’s new AI laboratory, LeCun will stay on at NYU part time, while working from a new Facebook facility on Astor Place in New York City.
The best way to understand something - such as life - is to build it yourself. That's why, determined to understand the way groups move, a team of New York University physicists set out to create particles that could imitate the way flocks of birds, schools of fish and even colonies of bacteria organize and move together.
One of the hallmarks of living things is self-replication, the ability to make new copies of biological structures. Scientists have harnessed this ability in several ways, using DNA and viruses to organize materials for things like solar panels. But inducing artificial self-replication, which would enable new types of self-fabricating materials, has proven more difficult. Now researchers at New York University say they've taken a step in that direction, building a complex artificial system that can self-replicate.
