It's estimated that as much as two-thirds of energy consumed in the U.S. each year is wasted as heat. Take for example, car engines, laptop computers, cell phones, even refrigerators, that heat up with overuse.
Imagine if you could capture the heat they generate and turn it into more energy.
Researchers at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering have developed an ultra-sensitive light-detecting system that could enable astronomers to view galaxies, stars and planetary systems in superb detail.
The queen problem is a mathematical task, which already had the great mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss occupied, but for which he surprisingly did not find the right solution. The challenge here is how to arrange eight queens on a classical chess board with 8 x 8 squares so that no two queens threaten each other. Mathematically, it is relatively easy to determine that there are 92 different ways to arrange the queens. On a chess board with 25 x 25 squares there are already more than 2 billion possibilities. The calculation of this number alone took a total of 53 years of CPU time.
Nearly 10 years ago, a group of Israeli clinical researchers emailed Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) geneticist Len Pennacchio to ask for his team's help in solving the mystery of a rare inherited disease that caused extreme, and sometimes fatal, chronic diarrhea in children.
Now, following an arduous investigative odyssey that expanded our understanding of regulatory sequences in the human genome, the multinational scientific group has announced the discovery of the genetic explanation for this disease. Their findings are published in Nature.
Antibodies are the biomolecules our immune systems deploy to find, tag, and destroy invading pathogens. They work by binding to specific targets, called epitopes, on the surfaces of antigens - like locks to keys.
Researchers studying the impact of fatigue on athletic performance have developed prototype software that can enable coaches to predict when elite athletes will be too fatigued to perform at their best.
QUT's Dr Paul Wu led the study published today in the journal PLOS One.
The research, which applies the tools of statistics to physiology research, provides new insights for athletes and their coaches into how best to manage and predict fatigue levels.
Individually, ants have only so much strength and intelligence. However, as a colony, they can use complex strategies to complete sophisticated tasks and evade larger predators.
Research for the benefit of food security: A new line of barley achieves good crop yields even under poor environmental conditions. It has been bred by a research team from Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU), which crossed a common variety with various types of wild barley. The researchers then planted the new lines of barley in five very different locations around the world, observed the growth of the plants and analysed their genetic make-up.
A kit made from everyday objects is bringing the blockchain into the physical world.
The 'BlocKit', which includes items such as plastic tubs, clay discs, padlocks, envelopes, sticky notes and battery-powered candles, is aimed to help people understand how digital blockchains work and can also be used by innovators designing new systems and services around blockchain.
Astronomers have spotted a distant pair of titanic black holes headed for a collision.
Each black hole's mass is more than 800 million times that of our sun. As the two gradually draw closer together in a death spiral, they will begin sending gravitational waves rippling through space-time. Those cosmic ripples will join the as-yet-undetected background noise of gravitational waves from other supermassive black holes.