ScienceDaily: Strange Science News

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• From chaos to order: How ants optimize food search
• Molecules do the triple twist
• Sound and vision: Visual cortex processes auditory information, too
• Mice with 'mohawks' help scientists link autism to two biological pathways in brain
• Alice in Wonderland contributes to advances in linguistics
• Paper-based diagnostics, made with a scrapbooking tool, could curb hepatitis C pandemic
• Not just for the heart, red wine shows promise as cavity fighter

From chaos to order: How ants optimize food search Posted: 26 May 2014 03:27 PM PDT Ants are capable of complex problem-solving strategies that could be widely applied as optimization techniques. An individual ant searching for food walks in random ways. Yet the collective foraging behavior of ants goes well beyond that, a mathematical study reveals: The animal movements at a certain point change from chaos to order. This happens in a self-organized way. Understanding the ants could help analyze similar phenomena -- for instance how humans roam the Internet.

Molecules do the triple twist Posted: 26 May 2014 07:16 AM PDT Scientists have managed to make a triple-Möbius annulene, the most twisted fully conjugated molecule to date. An everyday analogue of a single twisted Möbius molecule is a Möbius strip. It can be made easily by twisting one end of a paper strip by 180 degrees and then joining the two ends.

Sound and vision: Visual cortex processes auditory information, too Posted: 25 May 2014 12:53 PM PDT "Seeing is believing," so the idiom goes, but new research suggests vision also involves a bit of hearing too. "So, for example, if you are in a street and you hear the sound of an approaching motorbike, you expect to see a motorbike coming around the corner. If it turned out to be a horse, you'd be very surprised," researchers said.

Mice with 'mohawks' help scientists link autism to two biological pathways in brain Posted: 25 May 2014 12:47 PM PDT "Aha" moments are rare in medical research, scientists say. As rare, they add, as finding mice with Mohawk-like hairstyles. But both events happened in a lab, months after an international team of neuroscientists bred hundreds of mice with a suspect genetic mutation tied to autism spectrum disorders.

Alice in Wonderland contributes to advances in linguistics Posted: 22 May 2014 07:49 AM PDT A researcher has examined sentences that denote movement in 20 translations of Alice in Wonderland and two other novels. She used methods from evolutionary biology to analyze how linguistic descriptions of movement change over time.

Paper-based diagnostics, made with a scrapbooking tool, could curb hepatitis C pandemic Posted: 21 May 2014 10:37 AM PDT To the relief of patients diagnosed with hepatitis C, the US Food and Drug Administration approved two new treatments late last year, and a few more are on the way. Now scientists are solving another side of the disease's problem: identifying the millions more who have the virus but don't know it -- and unwittingly pass it on. A new report describes a novel, scrapbook-inspired test that does just that.

Not just for the heart, red wine shows promise as cavity fighter Posted: 21 May 2014 10:36 AM PDT For anyone searching for another reason to enjoy a glass of red wine with dinner, here's a good one: A new study has found that red wine, as well as grape seed extract, could potentially help prevent cavities.

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