Tech
For the past century, the world has relied on combustion engines powered by fossil fuels for transportation, but now lithium-ion battery-powered vehicles are emerging as sustainable successors. As major vehicle producers, European manufacturers are looking to establish their own lithium-ion battery market to compete with firms in Asia and the U.S. A new report in Chemical & Engineering News, the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society, explores the challenges and opportunities powering Europe's mission.
A new and promising approach for treatment of lung cancer has been developed by researchers at Lund University. The treatment combines a novel surgical approach with smart nanoparticles to specifically target lung tumors. The new study has been published in the July issue of Advanced Therapeutics.
Scientists at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory used neutron scattering and supercomputing to better understand how an organic solvent and water work together to break down plant biomass, creating a pathway to significantly improve the production of renewable biofuels and bioproducts.
In a groundbreaking new study, researchers at the University of Minnesota have 3D printed a functioning centimeter-scale human heart pump in the lab. The discovery could have major implications for studying heart disease, the leading cause of death in the United States killing more than 600,000 people a year.
The study is published and appears on the cover of Circulation Research, a publication of the American Heart Association.
NEW YORK, NY (July 15, 2020) - A study supported by the Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation and published today in JAMA Network Open provides the first evidence that rotigotine, a drug that acts on dopamine transmission in the brain, improves cognitive function in patients with mild-to-moderate Alzheimer's disease.
Door knobs, light switches, shopping carts. Fear runs rampant nowadays when it comes to touching common surfaces because of the rapid spread of the coronavirus.
A Virginia Tech professor has found a solution.
Since mid-March, William Ducker, a chemical engineering professor, has developed a surface coating that when painted on common objects, inactivates SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
"The idea is when the droplets land on a solid object, the virus within the droplets will be inactivated," Ducker said.
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. -- A self-driving car has a hard time recognizing the difference between a toddler and a brown bag that suddenly appears into view because of limitations in how it senses objects using lidar.
The autonomous vehicle industry is exploring "frequency modulated continuous wave" (FMCW) lidar to solve this problem. Researchers have built a way that this type of lidar could achieve higher-resolution detection of nearby fast-moving objects through mechanical control and modulation of light on a silicon chip.
In living organisms, DNA is the storage unit of all genetic information. It is with this information that proteins are encoded, which then enable biological systems to function as needed for the organism to survive. DNA's functioning is enabled by its structure: a double-stranded helix formed via the joining of specific pairs of molecules called 'nucleotides' in specific orders, called 'sequences'.
Tulane University researchers are part of a team of scientists who have developed a hybrid solar energy converter that generates electricity and steam with high efficiency and low cost.
The work led by Matthew Escarra, associate professor of physics and engineering physics at Tulane, and Daniel Codd, associate professor of mechanical engineering at the University of San Diego, is the culmination of a U.S. Department of Energy ARPA-E project that began in 2014 with $3.3 million in funding and involved years of prototype development at Tulane and field testing in San Diego.
University of Colorado Boulder researchers have used ultra-fast extreme ultraviolet lasers to measure the properties of materials more than 100 times thinner than a human red blood cell.
The team, led by scientists at JILA, reported its new feat of wafer-thinness this week in the journal Physical Review Materials. The group's target, a film just 5 nanometers thick, is the thinnest material that researchers have ever been able to fully probe, said study coauthor Joshua Knobloch.
Two daily fasting diets, also known as time-restricted feeding diets, are effective for weight loss, according to a new study published by researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
The study reported results from a clinical trial that compared a 4-hour time-restricted feeding diet and a 6-hour time-restricted feeding diet to a control group.
Various pro-inflammatory cytokines and pathogen-associated molecular patterns such as lipopolysaccharide (LPS) are known to activate NF-kB. NF-kB is a master regulator of inflammation and induces pro-inflammatory cytokines. Although LPS-induced pro-inflammatory cytokiens are indispensable for host defense against pathogens, dysregulated production can lead to septic shock. Septic shock is the most common cause of death in intensive care unit. Pro-inflammatory cytokines in a systemic scale inflammatory response result in increased capillary permeability and low blood pressure.
A new spin on the magnetic compression of plasmas could improve materials science, nuclear fusion research, X-ray generation and laboratory astrophysics, research led by the University of Michigan suggests.
The study shows that a spring-shaped magnetic field reduces the amount of plasma that slips out between the magnetic field lines.
Multicolour electrochromic displays are one of the most versatile applications because they can retain their coloured states without the need to supply electrical power. However, the simultaneous colouration of the counter layer when operating a conventional electrochromic display restricts the colour overlay effects. Additionally, the operation of conventional electrochromic displays requires external voltages to trigger the colouration/bleaching processes, which makes the conventional electrochromic displays far from a net-zero energy consumption technology.
Geoengineering - spraying sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to combat global warming - would only temporarily and partially benefit apple production in northern India, according to a Rutgers co-authored study.
But abruptly ending geoengineering might lead to total crop failure faster than if geoengineering were not done, according to the study - believed to be the first of its kind - in the journal Climatic Change.