Tech
Hypersonic flight is conventionally referred to as the ability to fly at speeds significantly faster than the speed of sound and presents an extraordinary set of technical challenges. As an example, when a space capsule re-enters Earth's atmosphere, it reaches hypersonic speeds--more than five times the speed of sound--and generates temperatures over 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit on its exterior surface.
In the journal Applied Physics Reviews (DOI: 10.1063/5.0020755), an international research team from the University of Barcelona, the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), and TU Darmstadt report on possibilities for implementing more efficient and environmentally friendly refrigeration processes. For this purpose, they investigated the effects of simultaneously exposing certain alloys to magnetic fields and mechanical stress.
There are around 40 million blind people in the world. Many of them would not benefit from a treatment of the eyes, e.g. in cases with damage to the optical nerve, where the connection between eye and brain is lost. For these patients, direct stimulation of the visual areas in the back of the brain could be the answer.
It's a peanut-filled world--or at least it can feel that way for kids with peanut allergies. But a new study by researchers at the University of British Columbia and BC Children's Hospital gives hope to parents and kids who face real danger from exposure to peanuts.
The crystalline solid BaTiS3 (barium titanium sulfide) is terrible at conducting heat, and it turns out that a wayward titanium atom that exists in two places at the same time is to blame.
Analysis from a University of Texas at Arlington assistant professor of public policy suggests that nationalistic governments around the globe are more likely to copy other nationalistic governments in responding to the current pandemic.
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. -- Instead of inserting a card or scanning a smartphone to make a payment, what if you could simply touch the machine with your finger?
A prototype developed by Purdue University engineers would essentially let your body act as the link between your card or smartphone and the reader or scanner, making it possible for you to transmit information just by touching a surface.
Using a new variant to repair DNA will improve both safety and effectiveness of the much-touted CRISPR-Cas9 tool in genetic research, Michigan Medicine researchers say.
Those two key problems - safety and efficacy - are what continue to hold CRISPR-Cas9 gene targeting back from its full clinical potential, explains co-senior author Y. Eugene Chen, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of internal medicine, cardiac surgery, physiology, pharmacology and medicinal chemistry, from the Michigan Medicine Frankel Cardiovascular Center.
Recently, there have been a number of electric vehicle (EV) battery fire incidents. Unlike the batteries used in small mobile devices, such as smartphones, the battery pack of an EV is composed of hundreds of battery cells, and any instability can cause major casualties and property damage. Amid various efforts to pinpoint the cause of battery fires, Korean researchers have developed a new analysis method to evaluate the thermal stability of EV batteries.
WASHINGTON--A small group of volcanic islands in Alaska's Aleutian chain might be part of a single, undiscovered giant volcano, say scientists presenting the findings Monday, 7 December at AGU's Fall Meeting 2020. If the researchers' suspicions are correct, the newfound volcanic caldera would belong to the same category of volcanoes as the Yellowstone Caldera and other volcanoes that have had super-eruptions with severe global consequences.
Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, have found that graphene-based heat pipes can help solve the problems of cooling electronics and power systems used in avionics, data centres, and other power electronics.
"Heat pipes are one of the most efficient tools for this purpose, because of their high efficiency and unique ability to transfer heat over a large distance," says Johan Liu, Professor of Electronics Production, at the Department of Microtechnology and Nanoscience at Chalmers.
Scientists at the Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares (CNIC) have identified a mitochondrial protein as a potential marker for the diagnosis of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and as a possible target for future treatments. The study is published today in the journal Nature.
At-a-glance:
Proof-of-concept study represents first successful attempt to reverse the aging clock in animals through epigenetic reprogramming.
Scientists turned on embryonic genes to reprogram cells of mouse retinas.
Approach reversed glaucoma-induced eye damage in animals.
Approach also restored age-related vision loss in elderly mice.
Work spells promise for using same approach in other tissues, organs beyond the eyes.
Success sets stage for treatment of various age-related diseases in humans.
People born with major birth defects face a higher risk of cancer throughout life, although the relative risk is greatest in childhood and then declines, finds a study published by The BMJ today.
The researchers found a continued increased risk of cancer in people who had been born with both non-chromosomal and chromosomal anomalies, suggesting that birth defects may share a common cause with some forms of cancer, be that genetic, environmental, or a combination of the two.
Nonlinear photonic crystals (NPCs) are transparent materials that have a spatially uniform linear susceptibility, yet a periodically modulated quadratic nonlinear susceptibility. These engineered materials are used extensively for studying nonlinear wave dynamics and in many scientific and industrial applications. Over the past two decades, there has been a continuous effort to find a technique that will enable the construction of three-dimensional (3D) NPCs. Such capability will enable many new schemes of manipulation and control of nonlinear optical interactions.