Inner Workings: Tarantula tint inspires new ways of making colors

Inner Workings: Tarantula tint inspires new ways of making colors.

Inner workings: Roboclam.

Calla Cofield Science Writer Digging in the sand might seem like child’s play, but doing it efficiently has stumped many adult engineers. As is often the case, nature has revealed a superior solution: this time in the Atlantic razor clam, which can burrow into and out of sandy ocean bottoms more efficiently than man-made, mechanical anchors. In 2008, Amos Winter, a professor of mechanical engin...

Inner workings: Malnutrition, gutted.

In 2010, Rashidul Haque spent a week at Washington University in St. Louis getting up to speed on a seemingly unpleasant task: the art and practice of collecting and storing human excrement. By learning the necessary steps for sample preservation and DNA extraction, Haque, who has spent the past 25 years developing new ways of diagnosing pathogens from clinical stool samples as head of the para...

Inner Workings of Neural Networks

A team of researchers at Google's DeepMind Technologies has been working on a means to increase the capabilities of computers by combining aspects of data processing and artificial intelligence and have come up with what they are calling a differentiable neural computer (DNC.) In their paper published in the journal Nature, they describe the work they are doing and where they believe it is head...

Techniques. A new window on the cell's inner workings.