Tech
Using DNA structures as scaffolds, Tim Liedl, a scientist of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich, has shown that precisely positioned gold nanoparticles can serve as efficient energy transmitters.
Orchids of the Boreal zone are rare species. Most of the 28,000 species of the Orchid family actually live in the tropics. In the Boreal zone, ground orchids can hardly tolerate competition from other plants -- mainly forbs or grasses. So they are often pushed into ecotones -- border areas between meadows and forests, or between forests and swamps.
Furthermore, there has been a decline in wild orchids all over North America and Eurasia, caused in part by human-induced destruction of their habitats, the transformation of ecosystems, and the harvesting of flowers from the wild.
Scientists have made a pivotal breakthrough in understanding the way in which cells communicate with each other.
A team of international researchers, including experts from the University of Exeter's Living Systems Institute, has identified how signalling pathways of Wnt proteins - which orchestrate and control many cell developmental processes - operate on both molecular and cellular levels.
Dengue risk is exacerbated in highly populated areas of Brazil after extreme drought because of improvised water containers housing mosquitoes, suggests a new study in Lancet Planetary Health.
The research was led by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine's (LSHTM) Centre on Climate Change & Planetary Health and Centre for the Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases. Using advanced statistical modelling techniques, the team predicted the timing and intensity of dengue risk in Brazil from extreme weather patterns.
Image inpainting is a computer vision technique in which pixels missing from an image are filled in. It is often used to remove unwanted objects from an image or to recreate missing regions of occluded images. Inpainting is a common tool for predicting missing image data, but it's challenging to synthesize the missing pixels in a realistic and coherent way.
A new study shows that several disagreements between Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt around Africa's largest hydropower plant, the new Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), could be alleviated by massively expanding solar and wind power across the region. Adapting GERD operation to support grid integration of solar and wind power would provide tangible energy and water benefits to all involved countries, creating regional win-win situations.
Researchers have developed a new algorithm capable of identifying features of male zebra finch songs that may underlie the distinction between a short phrase sung during courtship, and the same phrase sung in a non-courtship context. Sarah Woolley of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS Computational Biology.
Taiwan is an island of extremes: severe earthquakes and typhoons repeatedly strike the region and change the landscape, sometimes catastrophically. This makes Taiwan a fantastic laboratory for geosciences. Erosion processes, for example, occur up to a thousand times faster in the center of the island than in its far south. This difference in erosion rates influences the chemical weathering of rocks and yields insights into the carbon cycle of our planet on a scale of millions of years.
Every third-grader knows that plants absorb nutrients from the soil through their roots. The fact that they also release substances into the soil is probably less well known. And this seems to make the lives of plants a lot easier.
When it comes to choosing a partner, humans tend to be attracted by characteristics like personality and common interests. In contrast, insects tend to be a bit shallow, as they choose a mate based on appearance, and in some cases, smells. One example is the leaf beetle, which produces chemical pheromones that are on their cuticles, or the exterior surface of the beetle. They use these 'scents' to assess beetle sex and mating status (whether beetles are sexually mature or not).
The network of nerves connecting our eyes to our brains is sophisticated and researchers have now shown that it evolved much earlier than previously thought, thanks to an unexpected source: the gar fish.
Michigan State University's Ingo Braasch has helped an international research team show that this connection scheme was already present in ancient fish at least 450 million years ago. That makes it about 100 million years older than previously believed.
URBANA, Ill. - When scientists need to understand the effects of new infant formula ingredients on brain development, it's rarely possible for them to carry out initial safety studies with human subjects. After all, few parents are willing to hand over their newborns to test unproven ingredients.
Detecting and analyzing breast cancer goes beyond the initial discovery of the cancer itself. If a patient has a tumor removed and it needs to be analyzed to determine further treatment, it might be OK for the results to take 24 hours. But if the patient is still on the operating table and clinicians are waiting to make sure no cancer cells are present along the edges of the removed tumor, results need to be nearly immediate.