duke university

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This week on Crave, Japanese scientists teach moths to drive mini trucks, and a new app called Dognition claims to improve our relationship with man's best friend. Also, we decide if a $30 million Death Star Kickstarter campaign is worth it, and Montana is apparently full of badasses! Those stories and more, plus a round of "Into It, Not Into It." … Read more

It's a surprisingly dangerous world out there in the trees. Sparrows sing, flit about, and fight like they're auditioning for a role on "Game of Thrones." Male swamp sparrows will even take their battles to the death. Before they get that far, though, there's a whole lot of wing-waving going on to mark their territory and signal their aggression.

Duke University biologist Rindy Anderson wanted to learn more about how these birds communicate with each other, so she and engineering undergraduate student David Piech built a cyborg robo-battle-sparrow of doom.

The Frankensparrow consisted of a miniature computer and robotics gear stuffed into the body of a dead sparrow. This allowed the researchers to control the wings. They took the Frankenstein sparrow to a breeding ground, played swamp sparrow invasion songs, and made it wave its wings at other males, the sparrow equivalent of flipping them the bird.… Read more

A new program developed by a Duke University grad student promises to double the battery life of cell phones and other mobile devices by tweaking how they tap into Wi-Fi networks.

As described by its creator Justin Manweiler in a Duke Today story, downloading videos and other hefty content via Wi-Fi can cause a huge drain on the battery of a mobile device. This drain can be especially severe in crowded cities and other locations where multiple devices have to battle for available bandwidth.

So in an example cited by the story, downloading a movie in midtown Manhattan chews up … Read more

Sure, to some a record might be just a piece of plastic, but to me an LP is a beautiful object. It feels great in my hands, and looks amazing spinning on a turntable. There are dozens of LP cover art books, but just looking at light dancing on a LP's spiral groove is something I never tire of.

I own thousands of LPs and sometimes use them in my art. Of course the LP's prime attraction is its sound, so even as CD sales continue to decline, the LP looks like it will be around for the … Read more

Every year, some 16,000 babies in the U.S. experience loss of vision due to retinopathy of prematurity (RoP), with 400 to 600 becoming legally blind, according to the National Eye Institute. When babies are born prematurely, their retinal blood vessels don't always develop fully, and the abnormal vessels are more prone to leaking and contracting. If that causes the retina to detach, babies can lose some or all vision.

A new handheld device, developed in part by biomedical engineers at Duke University Medical Center, uses something called spectral domain optical coherence tomography (SD OCT) to create a 3D image of the back of the eye.

Duke Eye Center ophthalmologist Cynthia Toth compares the process to inspecting fish from the side of an aquarium instead of through an ocean's murky surface; the 3D high-resolution map reveals the retina's layers in intricate detail "at almost the cellular level," she says.… Read more

That cloaking device we've been dreaming of appears to be one step closer to actual cloakdom, so start pondering the mischievous possibilities.

Scientists from Duke University have improved on their earlier efforts at producing an invisibility cloak, coming up with a new type of device they say is significantly more sophisticated at cloaking an object (and eventually a person?) from visible light.

The device is made from a light-bending composite material that can detour electromagnetic waves around an object and reconnect them on the other side. That creates an effect similar to a distant mirage you'd see hovering above a road on a hot day.

In Duke's latest experiments, a beam of microwaves aimed through the cloaking device at a "bump" on a flat mirror surface bounced off the surface at the same angle, as if the bump wasn't there. Additionally, the device prevented the formation of scattered beams that would normally be expected from such a perturbation. (The team details its findings in far more technical terms than I ever could in the latest issue of Science magazine.) … Read more

Science has proven, once again, that advertising is effective. Who knew?

Researchers from upset-destined Duke University (fill out those brackets, people) and the University of Waterloo have published the results of a study that suggests that brief exposure to Apple's brand logo drives higher levels of creativity than exposure to IBM's logo. In fact, the researchers suggest that subliminal advertising is actually more effective than regular advertising, because people don't have time to raise their anti-ad defenses.

The researchers tested 341 students, who were told they were taking a "visual acuity test." The test involved … Read more