E-Mail
Credit: Gallio lab
With over 70% of respondents to a AAA annual survey on autonomous driving reporting they would fear being in a fully self-driving car, makers like Tesla may be back to the drawing board before rolling out fully autonomous self-driving systems. But new research from Northwestern University shows us we may be better off putting fruit flies behind the wheel instead of robots.
Drosophila have been subjects of science as long as humans have been running experiments in labs. But given their size, it s easy to wonder what can be learned by observing them. Research published today in the journal
Published 5 April 2021
The recent power outages in Texas brought attention to its power grid being separated from the rest of the country. While it is not immediately clear whether integration with other parts of the national grid would have completely eliminated the need for rolling outages, the state’s inability to import significant amounts of electricity was decisive in the blackout.
The recent power outages in Texas brought attention to its power grid being separated from the rest of the country. While it is not immediately clear whether integration with other parts of the national grid would have completely eliminated the need for rolling outages, the state’s inability to import significant amounts of electricity was decisive in the blackout.
Credit: Matthew Henry
The recent power outages in Texas brought attention to its power grid being separated from the rest of the country. While it is not immediately clear whether integration with other parts of the national grid would have completely eliminated the need for rolling outages, the state s inability to import significant amounts of electricity was decisive in the blackout.
A larger power grid has perks, but also has perils that researchers at Northwestern University are hoping to address to expedite integration and improvements to the system.
An obvious challenge in larger grids is that failures can propagate further in the case of Texas, across state lines. Another is that all power generators need to be kept synchronized to a common frequency in order to transmit energy. The U.S. is served by three separate grids: The Eastern interconnection, the Western interconnection and the Texas interconnection, interlinked only by direct-current power lines. Any persisten
Northwestern Now
The Fukushima accident was the most severe since the Chernobyl disaster of 1986.
It has been 10 years since a major earthquake and tsunami triggered the Fukushima nuclear accident of 2011.
Now, the Japanese town of Namie has been reduced to less than 8% of its original population as residents remain evacuated, said Mayor Kazuhiro Yoshida during his address to a global audience of nuclear experts, which was hosted on March 10 by Northwestern University.
From the event, Northwestern Now offers several points of view by experts who explain the inequities faced by the residents of that region and what it looks like today.
E-Mail
EVANSTON, Ill., - A new study by Northwestern University researchers finds that although human and non-human primate vocalizations facilitate core cognitive processes in very young human infants, birdsong does not.
Northwestern scientists in the departments of psychology at Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and communication sciences and disorders at the School of Communication, have new evidence documenting that not all naturally produced vocalizations support cognition in infants.
The new study, Birdsong fails to support object categorization in human infants, will publish in
PLOS ONE at 1 p.m. CST, Thursday, March 11.
Ample evidence documents that infants as young as three- and four-months of age have begun to link the language they hear to the objects that surround them. Listening to their native language boosts their success in forming categories of objects (e.g., dog). Object categorization, the ability to identify commonalities among objects (e.g., Fido,