Tech
New research has revealed for the first time that shield bugs use a variety of colours throughout their lives to avoid predators.
Shield bugs are often bright, colourful insects that use colours to warn off their distastefulness to predators. The paper, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, found that it is impossible to predict how an adult bug will look like based on their colour when young.
The importance of light-based technologies for our society was demonstrated once more in recent weeks. Thanks to the internet, millions of people can work remotely, enter virtual classrooms, or talk to friends and relatives. The internet, in turn, owes its power to countless light pulses with which enormous amounts of data are sent around the globe via optical fibres.
"Through a counterfactual analysis, we showed that between 1986 and 2011 the incentives to afforestation in Chile caused an increase in forest plantations, but reduced the extent of native forests", explains the academic from the Faculty of Forest Sciences at the Universidad de Concepción, UdeC, Dr. Cristian Echeverría, about the main conclusions of the paper Impacts of Chilean forest subsidies on forest cover, carbon and biodiversity, published by the journal Nature Sustainability, co-written with academicians Robert Heilmayr from the U. of California, and Eric F.
An international team of researchers, affiliated with UNIST has unveiled a novel material that could enable major leaps in the miniaturization of electronic devices. Published in the prestigious journal Nature, this study represent a significant achievement for future electronics.
Eating a Late Meal May Be Harmful To Your Metabolic Health, Particularly For Early Birds
Scientists from Staffordshire University claim that new 3D printed insoles can significantly improve the foot health of people suffering with diabetes.
This study offers hope for millions of patients with diabetes who are at risk of developing foot ulcers, which in many cases end up in amputation. It presents the first quantitative evidence in support of optimised cushioning in diabetic footwear as part of standard clinical practice.
A research team led by the University of Kent and Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main, has solved an almost 40-year old mystery in leukaemia therapy and the drug nelarabine.
Acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) is the most common cancer in children. There are two types of ALL: B-ALL, which resembles B lymphocytes (B-cells); and T-ALL, which resembles T lymphocytes (T-cells). Since the 1980s, it has been known that the drug nelarabine is effective against T-ALL but not against B-ALL, for reasons unknown.
Commercialized thin-film solar panels on the market consist of rare-earth elements like indium and gallium, or highly toxic metals like cadmium. Both of these thin-film solar panel types have their own problems, such as high-cost and problems in use in living places.
The idea that the immune system "monitors and prevents" the development of cancer, which is called "cancer immune vigilance", was initially proposed at the beginning of the last century. Since then, epidemiological studies have shown that the suppression of the immune system increases the risk of cancer, however, the molecular basis of this process is not well understood.
Researchers from Basel, Bochum and Copenhagen have gained new insights into the energy states of quantum dots. They are semiconductor nanostructures and promising building blocks for quantum communication. With their experiments, the scientists confirmed certain energy transitions in quantum dots that had previously only been predicted theoretically: the so-called radiative Auger process. For their investigations, the researchers in Basel and Copenhagen used special samples that the team from the Chair of Applied Solid State Physics at Ruhr-Universität Bochum had produced.
DNA replication is a process of critical importance to the cell, and must be coordinated precisely to ensure that genomic information is duplicated once and only once during each cell cycle. Using super-resolution technology a University of Technology Sydney led team has directly visualised the process of DNA replication in single human cells.
This is the first quantitative characterization to date of the spatio-temporal organisation, morphology, and in situ epigenetic signatures of individual replication foci (RFi) in single human cells at the nanoscale.
For the first time, researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and their colleagues have succeeded in using RNA sequencing as an alternative to immunohistochemistry for cancer diagnostics. Their study was published in Biomedicines.
Laser welding is a process suitable for joining metals and thermoplastics. It has become particularly well established in highly automated production, for example in the automotive industry, because a laser operates with virtually no wear, is very fast and offers high precision. But until now, the quality of a weld seam could only be documented retrospectively, either by means of X-rays, magnetic analysis methods or by dissecting individual samples from production. Real-time monitoring of the weld quality would be a major advantage.
Stable or instable
Scientists from the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University (IKBFU) and National University of Science and Technology "MISiS" have studied how magnet nanoparticles affect cancer cells in the human liver. In the authors' opinion, this research will help to treat oncology. The research results were published in the "Nano Convergence" Scientific Journal.
Until now, 2003 was considered as the driest and hottest year since the beginning of instrumental climate recording. This record can now be considered obsolete: "The past five years were among the warmest in Central Europe since record, and 2018 was the most extreme one," says Professor Bernhard Schuldt from Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg in Bavaria, Germany.