New findings suggest that through centuries of selectively breeding dogs for certain behaviors, humans have shaped the brains of their best friends. Studying the neuroanatomical variation in dogs offers a unique opportunity to study the evolutionary relationship between brain structure and behavior.

Norovirus causes 20 million cases of food poisoning in the US every year. Now, a smartphone can easily detect this gut-busting microbe -- hopefully before it gets you.

Birds can perch on a wide variety of surfaces, thick or thin, rough or slick. But can they find stable footing on a branch covered in Teflon? In the interest of making better robots, Stanford researchers found out.

By using eye-tracking technology to automatically control a pair of autofocus lenses, engineers have created a prototype for "autofocals" designed to restore proper vision in people who would ordinarily need progressive lenses. The autofocals are intended to solve the main problem with today's progressive lenses: They require the wearer to align his or her head to focus properly. The software in these autofocals fine-tunes the prototype's ability to keep its lenses in constant and perfect focus, regardless of the angle of view.

Researchers at the University of Washington have developed a new tool to monitor people for cardiac arrest while they're asleep without touching them. The tool has the ability to scan sound recordings for signs of agonal breathing using a machine learning algorithm, which potentially could be installed in smartphones or smart speakers like Amazon Alexa. Agonal breathing, a sign of cardiac arrest, is when people suddenly become unresponsive and either stop breathing or gasp for air.

Results of a new study involving macaque monkeys suggest that speech and music might have shaped the human brain's hearing circuits. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers monitored the brain activity of macaques and healthy human volunteers and how it responded to harmonic sounds, or tones. Humans were more sensitive to pitch, a key component of speech and music, than were the macaques.

An NSF-funded wave research laboratory sets the stage to study the structural integrity of buildings under severe weather conditions, which could help engineers devise better building codes and standards to protect future coastal structures.

Researchers at the University of Cincinnati have developed a new test that can easily and simply measure common stress hormones using sweat, blood, urine or saliva. The biosensor device is unique because of this ability to measure not only one but several biomarkers. Eventually, they hope to turn their ideas into a simple device that patients can use at home to monitor their mental and physical health.

Bacteria's use of "swim and tumble" maneuvers and chemical secretions helps them move toward food or away from poisons as they encounter obstacles, such as those found in the human gastrointestinal tract. The research, which involved an "obstacle course" of microfluidic chambers to experiment on the bacteria, holds implications for not only biology and medicine, but also robotic search and rescue tactics.

Researchers have created a pan-genome that captures all of the genetic information of 725 closely related wild and cultivated tomatoes. This resource of genetic information promises to help breeders develop more flavorful and sustainable varieties, and perhaps create more disease- and pest-resistant tomatoes. The pan-genome was the work of researchers from Boyce Thompson Institute and Cornell University's School of Integrative Plant Science and was jointly funded by NSF and the European Research Area Network for Coordinating Action in Plant Sciences (ERA-CAPS) Program.