Tech
PITTSBURGH--People rarely use just one sense to understand the world, but robots usually only rely on vision and, increasingly, touch. Carnegie Mellon University researchers find that robot perception could improve markedly by adding another sense: hearing.
A recently discovered soot-free flame called a blue whirl - which consumes all fuel it encounters - actually consists of three different flame structures that swirl together into one otherworldly blue ring, according to the first study to identify how these unique flames form. By revealing the blue whirl's structure, the findings may inform potential applications of the flame for efficient, low-emission combustion. "Only if we understand its structure can we tame it, scale it, and create it at will," Joseph Chung and colleagues write in the study.
A new insight into cell signals that control cancer growth and migration could help in the search for effective anti-cancer drugs. A McGill-led study reveals key biochemical processes that advance our understanding of colorectal cancer, the third most common cancer among Canadians.
Since the early 1930s, electron microscopy has provided unprecedented access to the alien world of the extraordinarily small, revealing intricate details that are otherwise impossible to discern with conventional light microscopy. But to achieve high resolution over a large specimen area, the energy of the electron beams needs to be cranked up, which is costly and detrimental to the specimen under observation.
Bird and reptile tears aren't so unlike our own, shows a new study in Frontiers in Veterinary Science. But the differences could provide insights into better ophthalmic treatments for humans and animals, as well as a clues into the evolution of tears across different species.
What if you could solve two of Earth's biggest problems in one stroke? UC Riverside engineers have developed a way to recycle plastic waste, such as soda or water bottles, into a nanomaterial useful for energy storage.
Mihri and Cengiz Ozkan and their students have been working for years on creating improved energy storage materials from sustainable sources, such as glass bottles, beach sand, Silly Putty, and portabella mushrooms. Their latest success could reduce plastic pollution and hasten the transition to 100% clean energy.
The most successful and cost-effective ways to restore coral reefs have been identified by an international group of scientists, after analysing restoration projects in Latin America.
The University of Queensland's Dr Elisa Bayraktarov led the team that investigated 12 coral reef restoration case studies in five countries.
"Coral reefs worldwide are degrading due to climate change, overfishing, pollution, coastal development, coral bleaching and diseases," Dr Bayraktarov said.
For the first time, researchers in Germany sent perovskite and organic solar cells on a rocket into space. The solar cells withstood the extreme conditions in space, producing power from direct sunlight and reflective light from the Earth's surface. The work, published August 12 in the journal Joule, sets the foundation for future near-Earth application as well as potential deep space missions.
Graphene, an extremely thin two-dimensional layer of the graphite used in pencils, buckles when cooled while attached to a flat surface, resulting in beautiful pucker patterns that could benefit the search for novel quantum materials and superconductors, according to Rutgers-led research in the journal Nature.
The oceans play an important role in regulating our climate and its change by absorbing heat and carbon.
The implications of their results, published today in Nature, are significant because regional sea level, affecting coastal populations around the world, depends on patterns of ocean warming. In this study they show how these patterns are likely to change.
Converting CO2 to value-added chemicals driven by renewable energy is a strategy of reducing carbon emission and alleviating pressure from depleting fossil resources. Electrocatalytic CO2 reduction (CO2R) to CO is an important way for CO2 utilization since CO is widely used for chemical synthesis.
A 'one-size-fits-all' approach to producing cleaner energy based on cost alone could create social inequalities, finds a new study.
The Paris Agreement aims to keep global temperature rise this century well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5°C. One major route to achieving this is for countries to reach 'net zero' carbon emissions by 2050 - either producing no emissions or removing the same amount that they produce.
Earlier this year, a team from Japan's National Institute of Polar Research (NIPR), National Museum of Nature and Science (NMNS), and Kochi University (KU) set out to collect specimens of sea worm near the South Orkney Islands, a remote region of the Southern Ocean about 400 miles northeast of the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula.
Singapore, 12 August 2020 - Researchers from Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT's research enterprise in Singapore, have discovered a new way to reverse antibiotic resistance in some bacteria using hydrogen sulphide (H2S).
Growing antimicrobial resistance is a major threat for the world with a projected 10 million deaths each year by 2050 if no action is taken. The World Health Organisation also warns that by 2030, drug-resistant diseases could force up to 24 million people into extreme poverty and cause catastrophic damage to the world economy.
Calls via the LTE mobile network, also known as 4G, are encrypted and should therefore be tap-proof. However, researchers from the Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security (HGI) at Ruhr-Universität Bochum have shown that this is not always the case. They were able to decrypt the contents of telephone calls if they were in the same radio cell as their target, whose mobile phone they then called immediately following the call they wanted to intercept. They exploit a flaw that some manufacturers had made in implementing the base stations.