If you want to save on your monthly electric bill and reduce your greenhouse gas emissions at the same time, you might buy a new, energy-efficient refrigerator. Or water heater. Or clothes dryer. But if you can only replace one of these, which will give you the biggest payback?
Tech
A team of researchers from the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, the University of Illinois at Chicago and the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have engineered silicon particles one-fiftieth the width of a human hair, which could lead to "biointerface" systems designed to make nerve cells fire and heart cells beat.
Bozhi Tian, who led one of the University of Chicago research groups, said the particles can establish unique biointerfaces on cell membranes, because they are deformable but can still yield a local electrical effect.
WASHINGTON (Aug. 1, 2016) -- New research critical to treatment for chronic toxoplasmosis, one of the most common parasitic diseases worldwide, was published in the Journal of Experimental Medicine. Researchers from the George Washington University (GW) uncovered a connection between CD8 T-cell exhaustion and CD4 T-cell exhaustion, not found before. They also discovered that CD4 T-cells can be regulated by Blimp-1 protein expression. Through regulating CD4 T-cells, CD8 T-cells can be regulated, which could lead to new therapeutic possibilities.
Students at Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences have developed "Ourobot". / Their project was supervised by a professor at the Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences and a CITEC researcher.
Haptics researchers have long known that applying ultrasonic vibrations to a flat, featureless glass plate makes it feel slippery. But they have also long debated why this occurs.
Northwestern University's J. Edward Colgate and his team have finally put the debate -- and mystery -- to rest. They discovered that the vibrations reduce friction by causing the fingertip to bounce on pockets of trapped air.
WASHINGTON, D.C., August 2, 2016 -- Invisibility cloaks have less to do with magic than with metamaterials. These human-engineered materials have properties that don't occur in nature, allowing them to bend and manipulate light in weird ways. For example, some of these materials can channel light around an object so that it appears invisible at a certain wavelength. These materials are also useful in applications such as smaller, faster, and more energy efficient optics, sensors, light sources, light detectors and telecommunications devices.
Archaeological sites speak about the everyday lives of people in other times. Yet knowing how to interpret this reality does not tend to be straightforward. We know that Palaeolithic societies lived on hunting and gathering, but the bones found in prehistoric settlements are not always the food leftovers of the societies that lived in them. Or they are not exclusively that.
Extraordinary things happen to ordinary materials when they are subjected to very high pressure and temperature. Sodium, a conductive metal in normal conditions, becomes a transparent insulator; gaseous hydrogen becomes a solid.
BEER-SHEVA, Israel ... August 1, 2016 -- The first single actuator wave-like robot (SAW) has been developed by engineers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU). The 3D-printed robot can move forward or backward in a wave-like motion, moving much like a worm would in a perpendicular wave. SAW VIDEO
A group of researchers at Immunology Frontier Research Center (IFReC), Osaka University and RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Sciences jointly clarified the mechanism for inducing germinal-center B cells' differentiation into memory B cells, immune cells that remember antigens, at the molecular level.
Chemists at The University of Texas at Arlington have invented a method to quantify water content in solid pharmaceutical drugs that is faster, cheaper, more accurate and more precise than Karl Fischer titration, the method currently recognized by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and widely used worldwide.
Quantifying water content is one of the most common chemical tests, with more than 130 million processes carried out each year globally. Testing pharmaceutical drugs is required by the FDA and represents an important and costly investment on the part of drug manufacturers.
Daejeon, Republic of Korea, July 29, 2016--With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) era, strong demand has grown for wearable and transparent displays that can be applied to various fields such as augmented reality (AR) and skin-like thin flexible devices. However, previous flexible transparent displays have posed real challenges to overcome, which are, among others, poor transparency and low electrical performance.
Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign have developed a new method for making brighter and more efficient green light-emitting diodes (LEDs). Using an industry-standard semiconductor growth technique, they have created gallium nitride (GaN) cubic crystals grown on a silicon substrate that are capable of producing powerful green light for advanced solid-state lighting.
In the first comprehensive work of its kind, a Michigan State University criminologist has completed a study on the implementation and outcomes of public safety consolidation - the merging of a city's police and fire departments.
In the study, released recently in a report by the U.S. Department of Justice, professor of criminal justice Jeremy Wilson details that while public safety consolidation can work well for some communities, it isn't the best solution for others.
It may be clammy and inconvenient, but human sweat has at least one positive characteristic - it can give insight to what's happening inside your body. A new study published in the ECS Journal of Solid State Science and Technology aims to take advantage of sweat's trove of medical information through the development of a sustainable, wearable sensor to detect lactate levels in your perspiration.