Tech
A stretchable system that can harvest energy from human breathing and motion for use in wearable health-monitoring devices may be possible, according to an international team of researchers, led by Huanyu "Larry" Cheng, Dorothy Quiggle Career Development Professor in Penn State's Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics.
The research team, with members from Penn State and Minjiang University and Nanjing University, both in China, recently published its results in Nano Energy.
CORVALLIS, Ore. - Researchers at Oregon State University are making key advances with a new type of optical sensor that more closely mimics the human eye's ability to perceive changes in its visual field.
The sensor is a major breakthrough for fields such as image recognition, robotics and artificial intelligence. Findings by OSU College of Engineering researcher John Labram and graduate student Cinthya Trujillo Herrera were published today in Applied Physics Letters.
LOS ALAMOS, N.M., Dec. 7, 2020-- A collaborative research team, including Los Alamos National Laboratory, University of Stuttgart (Germany), University of New Mexico, and Sandia National Laboratories, has developed a proton conductor for fuel cells based on polystyrene phosphonic acids that maintain high protonic conductivity up to 200 C without water. They describe the material advance in a paper published this week in Nature Materials.
A multi-national research team has exploited long-term data sets that span 2001 to 2018 to reveal the utility of tree height quantifications in informing conservation decisions of an arborescent cycad species. The field work was led by the University of Guam and targeted Cycas micronesica from the Micronesian Islands of Guam, Tinian, and Yap as the model species. The findings were reported in the journal Plant Signaling & Behavior, appearing online in Volume 15, Issue 12 (doi: 10.1080/15592324.2020.1830237).
A team of researchers from University of Toronto Engineering has created a new process for converting carbon dioxide (CO2) captured from smokestacks into commercially valuable products, such as fuels and plastics.
Although most people learn to speak their mother tongue fluently, native speakers differ in their ability to use language. Adult language users not only differ in the number of words they know, they also differ in how quickly they produce and understand words and sentences. How do individuals differ across language tasks? Are individual differences in language ability related to general cognitive abilities?
Scientists at Tokyo Institute of Technology have discovered that a silver-doped platinum thiolate nanometal complex shows 18-fold greater photoluminescence than the original platinum complex. In their recent paper, they provide insights into the causes of this, crowning a new approach to creating efficient non-toxic and biocompatible compounds for bioimaging.
In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, two human factors are battling it out: awareness of the virus's severe consequences and fatigue from nine months of pandemic precautions. The results of that battle can be seen in the oddly shaped case, hospitalization, and fatality-count graphs, a new study suggests.
Lurking in sediments and surrounding the precious groundwater beneath our feet is a dangerous toxin: uranium. Scientists have long known this and tested for it. But now Stanford researchers have identified the trigger that causes naturally occurring uranium to dislodge from sediments and seep into groundwater, pointing to a solution for managing the toxin before it becomes a problem.
Within the staggeringly complex networks of neurons which make up our brains, electric currents display intricate dynamics in the electric currents they convey. To better understand how these networks behave, researchers in the past have developed models which aim to mimic their dynamics. In some rare circumstances, their results have indicated that 'tipping points' can occur, where the systems abruptly transition from one state to another: events now commonly thought to be associated with episodes of epilepsy.
Portable device allows rapid detection of nitrogen deficiency - a critical nutrient for plant health
When tested on popular vegetables such as Spinach and Kai Lan, the device was also able to detect levels of other metabolites; allowing measurement of a wider range of plant stress phenotypes such as drought, heat/cold, saline and light stress
New tool offers economical, sustainable, and environmentally-friendly method to fight food insecurity
According to a new study by Tampere University in Finland, making eye contact with a robot may have the same effect on people as eye contact with another person. The results predict that interaction between humans and humanoid robots will be surprisingly smooth.
A team of researchers understands more about the melting of the Greenland ice sheet. They discovered a flow of hot rocks, known as a mantle plume, rising from the core-mantle boundary beneath central Greenland that melts the ice from below.
The results of their two-part study were published in the Journal of Geophysical Research.
Every day we effortlessly make countless grasping movements. We take a key in our hand, open the front door by operating the door handle, then pull it closed from the outside and lock it with the key. What is a natural matter for us is based on a complex interaction of our eyes, different regions of the brain and ultimately our muscles in the arm and hand.
Neural networks are some of the most important tools in artificial intelligence (AI): they mimic the operation of the human brain and can reliably recognize texts, language and images, to name but a few. So far, they run on traditional processors in the form of adaptive software, but experts are working on an alternative concept, the "neuromorphic computer". In this case, the brain's switching points - the neurons - are not simulated by software but reconstructed in hardware components.