Tech
Organic molecules that capture photons and convert these into electricity have important applications for producing green energy. Light-harvesting complexes need two semiconductors, an electron donor and an acceptor. How well they work is measured by their quantum efficiency, the rate by which photons are converted into electron-hole pairs.
Carbon nanotubes are tiny. They can be a hundred thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair. But they have huge potential.
Products manufactured using carbon nanotubes include rebar for concrete, sporting goods, wind turbines, and lithium batteries, among others.
Potential uses of carbon nanotubes could extend to diverse fields, such as agriculture, biomedicine and space science.
But as we use more carbon nanotubes to make things, we also increase the chances that these nanotubes enter different environments and ecosystems.
February 24, 2021 - The second study published in as many months has identified another reason to add more mushrooms to the recommended American diet. The new research , published in Food & Nutrition Research (February 2021), examined the addition of mushrooms to U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Food Patterns resulting in the increase of several micronutrients including shortfall nutrients, while having a minimal to zero impact on overall calories, sodium or saturated fat.
Today's quantum computers contain up to several dozen memory and processing units, the so-called qubits. Severin Daiss, Stefan Langenfeld, and colleagues from the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching have successfully interconnected two such qubits located in different labs to a distributed quantum computer by linking the qubits with a 60-meter-long optical fiber. Over such a distance they realized a quantum-logic gate - the basic building block of a quantum computer. It makes the system the worldwide first prototype of a distributed quantum computer.
Everyone knows 2 + 2 = 4, but what about mosquitoes plus malaria? Lauren Childs, an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics at Virginia Tech, says there's an equation for that too.
Childs recently co-authored a report with a team from Harvard University on the role of natural mosquito behavior on transmission of a disease that threatens half the world's population.
Prisons with more green space have lower levels of violence and self-harm, according to new research at the University of Birmingham and Utrecht University.
The study is the first to attempt large-scale mapping of green space within prison environments and link it to well-being in a robust, statistically significant way. The results are published in Annals of the American Association of Geographers.
A new report shows that British citizens who are missing abroad were more than twice as likely to be found by UK police as police in the country of disappearance.
Research by the Centre for the Study of Missing Persons (CSMP) at the University of Portsmouth also shows they were likely to be missing for much longer than if they'd disappeared in the UK.
The study found that British people who vanish abroad tend to be missing for extended periods, on average 134 days. This compares with 88 percent of people who go missing in the UK being found within the first 48 hours.
With the voice commands "Alexa Skills," users can load numerous extra functions onto their Amazon voice assistant. However, these Skills can often have security gaps and data protection problems, as a team of researchers from the Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) and North Carolina State University discovered, together with a former PhD student who started to work for Google during the project. They will present their work at the "Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS)" conference on 24 February 2021.
A recent study of homeless preschoolers found a strong correlation between the bonds those children formed with teachers and the children's risk of behavioral and emotional problems.
"It's well established that children who are homeless are at higher risk of a wide variety of negative outcomes," says Mary Haskett, corresponding author of the study and a professor of psychology at North Carolina State University. "However, there's a lot of variability within this group. We wanted to learn more about what makes some of these children more resilient than others."
A new study from researchers at the University of Ottawa's School of Psychology has found that using negative emojis in text messages produces a negative perception of the sender regardless of their true intent.
Isabelle Boutet, a Full Professor in Psychology in the Faculty of Social Sciences, and her team's findings are included in the study 'Emojis influence emotional communication, social attributions, and information processing' which was published in Computers in Human Behavior.
Polished glass has been at the center of imaging systems for centuries. Their precise curvature enables lenses to focus light and produce sharp images, whether the object in view is a single cell, the page of a book, or a far-off galaxy.
Changing focus to see clearly at all these scales typically requires physically moving a lens, by tilting, sliding, or otherwise shifting the lens, usually with the help of mechanical parts that add to the bulk of microscopes and telescopes.
Abu Dhabi, UAE, February 22: By engineering common filter papers, similar to coffee filters, a team of NYU Abu Dhabi researchers have created high throughput arrays of miniaturized 3D tumor models to replicate key aspects of tumor physiology, which are absent in traditional drug testing platforms. With the new paper-based technology, the formed tumor models can be safely cryopreserved and stored for prolonged periods for on-demand drug testing use.
HOUSTON - (Feb. 22, 2021) -Tuberculosis bacteria have evolved to remember stressful encounters and react quickly to future stress, according to a study by computational bioengineers at Rice University and infectious disease experts at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School (NJMS).
SAN ANTONIO -- Feb. 22, 2021 -- From aboard the Juno spacecraft, a Southwest Research Institute-led instrument observing auroras serendipitously spotted a bright flash above Jupiter's clouds last spring. The Ultraviolet Spectrograph (UVS) team studied the data and determined that they had captured a bolide, an extremely bright meteoroid explosion in the gas giant's upper atmosphere.
For only the second time, astronomers have linked an elusive particle called a high-energy neutrino to an object outside our galaxy. Using ground- and space-based facilities, including NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, they traced the neutrino to a black hole tearing apart a star, a rare cataclysmic occurrence called a tidal disruption event.