Tech
Eighty percent of Americans over 50 say their primary care doctor hasn't asked about their hearing in the past two years, and nearly as many - 77% -- haven't had their hearing checked by a professional in that same time, according to a new national poll report.
While natural disasters and economic recessions traditionally unleash an uptick in child abuse, a new study suggests that cases may have declined in the first months of the pandemic, compared with the same timeframe in previous years.
Around the world there are currently more than 18 billion internet-connected mobile devices. In the next 10 years, anticipated growth in the Internet of Things (IoT) and in machine-type communication in general, will lead to a world of hundreds of billions of data-connected objects. Such growth poses two very challenging problems:
How can we securely connect so many wireless devices to the Internet when the radio-frequency bandwidth has already become very scarce?
How can all these devices be powered?
A number of scientists whose work is inspired by natural behavior is constantly growing. The lotus flower, with its ability to self- clean, is commonly described in literature and can be best examples the trend. Researchers started to wonder why the flower behaves in this manner and they decided to study its structure with the use of microscopes. Hence, they could draw the conclusion that the structure is highly hydrophobic, i.e. it maintains water drops on the surface. Water then collects particles of dust and by flowing down, removes them by flowing down.
TPU researchers jointly with their colleagues from foreign universities have developed a method that allows for a laser-driven integration of metals into polymers to form electrically conductive composites. The research findings are presented in Ultra-Robust Flexible Electronics by Laser-Driven Polymer-Nanomaterials Integration article Ultra-Robust Flexible Electronics by Laser-Driven Polymer-Nanomaterials Integration, published in Advanced Functional Materials academic journal (Q1, IF 16,836).
The key are the ultra-fast flashes of light, with which the team led by Dr. Friedrich Roth works at FLASH in Hamburg, the world's first free-electron laser in the X-ray region. "We took advantage of the special properties of this X-ray source and expanded them with time-resolved X-ray photoemission spectroscopy (TR-XPS). This method is based on the external photoelectric effect, for the explanation of which Albert Einstein received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921.
Research groups at the University of Helsinki uncovered how motor protein myosin, which is responsible for contraction of skeletal muscles, functions also in non-muscle cells to build contractile structures at the inner face of the cell membrane. This is the first time when such 'mini-muscles', also known as stress fibers, have been seen to emerge spontaneously through myosin-driven reorganization of the pre-existing actin filament network in cells.
Recently, research group led by Professor CHENG Lin from School of Microelectronics, University of science and technology of China has made significant achievements in the field of fully integrated isolated power chip design. They proposed a chip based on glass fan-out wafer-level package (FOWLP), achieving 46.5% peak transformation efficiency and 50mW/mm2 power density.
Organometallic reagents are essential tools in synthetic chemistry. They work even better and more effectively in combination with alkali alkoxides. The exact nature of this effect has never been well understood. A team based in Switzerland has now performed a detailed study of the mechanism of reaction of aryl bromides with organo-magnesium reagents and lithium alkoxides. As reported in the journal Angewandte Chemie, a complex equilibrium of bimetallic intermediates plays a key role.
Recently, the Laboratory of Micro and Nano Engineering, School of Engineering Science, University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) has made important progress in the field of structural chirality detection research using vortex light and found that photon orbital angular momentum can efficiently detect the optical chiral signal of structures.
The achievement was published in an international well-known journal PNAS.
Aqueous free-radical precipitation polymerization is one of the most useful methods to prepare the uniformly sized hydrogel microspheres (microgels), and an understanding of the polymerization mechanism is crucial to control the structure or physicochemical properties of microgels. However, the details of the mechanism of precipitation polymerization remain unclear.
The study examined the gender and affiliations of 1051 top-authors, those scientists with the most publications in 13 leading ecology and conservation journals. The results show that women and the Global South are barely represented on this list. "The overall list of top authors included only 11% women, while 75% of the articles were related to just five countries in the Global North," says Bea Maas, lead author from the University of Vienna.
A technological and biological development that is unprecedented in Israel and the world has been achieved at Tel Aviv University. For the first time, the ear of a dead locust has been connected to a robot that receives the ear's electrical signals and responds accordingly. The result is extraordinary: When the researchers clap once, the locust's ear hears the sound and the robot moves forward; when the researchers clap twice, the robot moves backwards.
Removal of pollutants from the air, or atmospheric deposition, is a natural cleaning mechanism. However, the removed toxic matters don't just disappear on the Earth. China's Soil Pollution Survey released in 2014 shows that 19.4% of the Chinese farmland soil was polluted and 82% of pollutant was toxic heavy metals such as cadmium, which can cause chronic health problems.
Earth's surface environments are highly oxygenated - from the atmosphere to the deepest reaches of the oceans, representing a hallmark of active photosynthetic biosphere. However, the fundamental timescale of the oxygen-rich atmosphere on Earth remains uncertain, particularly for the distant future. Solving this question has great ramifications not only for the future of Earth's biosphere but for the search for life on Earth-like planets beyond the solar system.