Tech
Why is sugar not transparent? Because light that penetrates a piece of sugar is scattered, altered and deflected in a highly complicated way. However, as a research team from TU Wien (Vienna) and Utrecht University (Netherlands) has now been able to show, there is a class of very special light waves for which this does not apply: for any specific disordered medium--such as the sugar cube you may just have put in your coffee--tailor-made light beams can be constructed that are practically not changed by this medium, but only attenuated.
Squirrels and other tree-dwelling rodents evolved to have bigger brains than their burrowing cousins, a study suggests.
This greater brain power has given them key abilities needed to thrive in woodland habitats, including better vision and motor skills, and improved head and eye movements, researchers say.
Scientists have shed light on how the brains of rodents - a diverse group that accounts for more than 40 per cent of all mammals - have changed since they evolved around 50 million years ago.
A new 160-million-year-old arboreal pterosaur species, dubbed 'Monkeydactyl', has the oldest true opposed thumb - a novel structure previously not known in pterosaurs.
An international team of researchers from China, Brazil, UK, Denmark and Japan have described a new Jurassic pterosaur Kunpengopterus antipollicatus, which was discovered in the Tiaojishan Formation of Liaoning, China.
It is a small-bodied darwinopteran pterosaur, with an estimated wingspan of 85 cm. Most importantly, the specimen was preserved with an opposed pollex ("thumb") on both hands.
Singapore, 12 April 2021 - Researchers from the Low Energy Electronic Systems (LEES) Interdisciplinary Research Group (IRG) at Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT's research enterprise in Singapore, together with Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and National University of Singapore (NUS) have found a method to quantify the distribution of compositional fluctuations in the indium gallium nitride (InGaN) quantum wells (QWs) at different indium concentrations.
Origami may sound more like art than science, but a complex folding pathway that proteins use to determine their shape has been harnessed by molecular biologists, enabling them to build some of the most complex synthetic protein nanostructures to date.
Smoking cannabis when you're young may increase your risk of developing heart disease later, according to a recent University of Guelph study.
In the first study to look at specific risk indicators for cardiovascular disease (CVD) in young, healthy cannabis users, researchers found subtle but potentially important changes in heart and artery function.
The detrimental impact of pesticides on non-target organisms is one of the most urgent concerns in current agriculture. Double-stranded RNAs (dsRNAs) represent the most species-specific class of pesticides to date, potentially allowing control of a target pest without effecting other species. The unprecedented target-specificity of dsRNA is due to its nucleotide sequence-specific mode of action that results in post-transcriptional gene silencing, or RNA interference (RNAi), in the target species.
WASHINGTON--Deep in a Jamaican cave is a treasure trove of bat poop, deposited in sequential layers by generations of bats over 4,300 years.
Analogous to records of the past found in layers of lake mud and Antarctic ice, the guano pile is roughly the height of a tall man (2 meters), largely undisturbed, and holds information about changes in climate and how the bats' food sources shifted over the millennia, according to a new study.
A new algorithm can predict which genes cause cancer, even if their DNA sequence is not changed. A team of researchers in Berlin combined a wide variety of data, analyzed it with "Artificial Intelligence" and identified numerous cancer genes. This opens up new perspectives for targeted cancer therapy in personalized medicine and for the development of biomarkers.
When winter storms threaten to make travel dangerous, people often turn to salt, spreading it liberally over highways, streets and sidewalks to melt snow and ice. Road salt is an important tool for safety, because many thousands of people die or are injured every year due to weather related accidents.
Energy flows through a system of atoms or molecules by a series of processes such as transfers, emissions, or decay. You can visualize some of these details like passing a ball (the energy) to someone else (another particle), except the pass happens quicker than the blink of an eye, so fast that the details about the exchange are not well understood. Imagine the same exchange happening in a busy room, with others bumping into you and generally complicating and slowing the pass.
Creating a two-dimensional material, just a few atoms thick, is often an arduous process requiring sophisticated equipment. So scientists were surprised to see 2D puddles emerge inside a three-dimensional superconductor - a material that allows electrons to travel with 100% efficiency and zero resistance - with no prompting.
Within those puddles, superconducting electrons acted as if they were confined inside an incredibly thin, sheet-like plane, a situation that requires them to somehow cross over to another dimension, where different rules of quantum physics apply.
Study: "Which U.S. Elementary Schoolchildren Are More Likely to Be Frequently Bullied?"
Authors: Paul Morgan (Pennsylvania State University), Adrienne D. Woods (Pennsylvania State University), Yangyang Wang (Pennsylvania State University), George Farkas (University of California, Irvine), Yoonkyung Oh (University of Texas Health Science Center), Marianne Hillemeier (Pennsylvania State University), Cynthia Mitchell (Pennsylvania State University)
Older adults with more harmful than healthy bacteria in their gums are more likely to have evidence for amyloid beta--a key biomarker for Alzheimer's disease--in their cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), according to new research from NYU College of Dentistry and Weill Cornell Medicine. However, this imbalance in oral bacteria was not associated with another Alzheimer's biomarker called tau.
Respiratory disease increased markedly following one of Iceland's largest volcanic eruptions, a new study has found.
And the findings could have significant implications for actions taken to protect the health of the 800 million people globally living near active volcanoes. Indeed, only last month (March), lava burst through a crack in Iceland's Mount Fagradalsfjall in the first eruption of its type in more than 800 years.