People rarely think about culverts until they are gone. These plain pipes and boxes carry roads over streams and span less than 20 feet -- the federal cutoff for what counts as a bridge. That means road-stream crossings stay out of the National Bridge Inventory and therefore, off the inspection schedule. Yet, when Tropical Storm Irene tore through New England in 2011, it destroyed more than 960 of them in Vermont's Green Mountains alone and left 13 communities entirely cut off for days.

Researchers led by Andreagiovanni Reina from the University of Konstanz have shown that a simple interaction rule enables robot swarms to reach clear collective decisions despite faulty or manipulated information. Remarkably, the same basic decision-making logic recurs across very different biological systems.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet and Stockholm University have developed a new tool that estimates a cell’s biological age by analyzing its gene activity. In the journal Advanced Science, they also demonstrate how the tool can be used to identify substances that influence cellular ageing.