Tech
Scientists from the University of Cambridge, in collaboration with the Hubrecht Institute in The Netherlands, have developed a new model to study an early stage of human development, using human embryonic stem cells. The model resembles some key elements of an embryo at around 18-21 days old and allows the researchers to observe the processes underlying the formation of the human body plan never directly observed before. Understanding these processes holds potential to reveal the causes of human birth defects and diseases, and to develop tests for these in pregnant women.
EAST LANSING, Mich. - As policymakers increasingly turn toward science in addressing global climate change, one Michigan State University scientist is looking to nature to develop the next generation of solar energy technology.
MSU Foundation Professor James McCusker, Department of Chemistry, believes that the future of solar energy lies in abundant, scalable materials designed to mimic and improve upon the energy conversion systems found in nature.
Pathogens that attack agricultural crops show remarkable adaptability to new climates and new plant hosts, new research shows.
Researchers at the Department of Biosciences, University of Exeter studied the temperature preferences and host plant diversity of hundreds of fungi and oomycetes that attack our crops.
The researchers found that plant pathogens can specialise on particular temperatures or host plants, or have wide temperature or host ranges.
Some metal oxides, such as nickelates, have a tuneable resistivity, which makes them an interesting material for adaptable electronics and cognitive computing. These materials can change their nature from metallic to insulating. How exactly this metal-insulator transition takes place is a topic of great interest in condensed matter physics. However, even the metallic behaviour in nickelates seems unusual. Scientists from the University of Groningen, together with colleagues from Spain, have now found that it is not as complex as was previously assumed.
As farmers across the globe look to grow food more sustainably – with less water, fertilizer, pesticides and other environmental impacts – the use of cover crops is becoming more popular. These crops, which are often grasses or legumes, but also many other types of plants, are generally grown between the harvest and planting season of the land’s main cash crop, to reduce erosion, build soil fertility and control weeds, among other benefits. Their use has jumped in recent years. From 2012 to 2017, U.S. cover crops increased to 6.2 million hectares, an increase of 50 percent.
Place a single sheet of carbon atop another at a slight angle and remarkable properties emerge, including the highly prized resistance-free flow of current known as superconductivity.
Now a team of researchers at Princeton has looked for the origins of this unusual behavior in a material known as magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene, and detected signatures of a cascade of energy transitions that could help explain how superconductivity arises in this material. The paper was published online on June 11 in the journal Nature.
Ann Arbor, June 11, 2020 - A new study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, published by Elsevier, takes a closer look at the benefits of volunteering to the health and well-being of volunteers, both validating and refuting findings from previous research.
The amount of exchangeable potassium (K) contained in native soil does not always meet the necessary nutrient demand for a pear tree, which makes the use of K based fertilizer essential. Brazilian farmers face daily challenges to increase their productivity. Such challenges include a lack of knowledge of optimum fertilizer doses, and the critical levels of those fertilizer.
In the future, camera lenses could be thousands of times thinner and significantly less resource-intensive to manufacture. Researchers from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, now present a new technology for making the artificial materials known as 'metasurfaces', which consist of a multitude of interacting nanoparticles that together can control light. They could have great use in the optical technology of tomorrow.
An international team led by scientists at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) has recently developed the world's first 3D artificial eye with capabilities better than existing bionic eyes and in some cases, even exceed those of the human eyes, bringing vision to humanoid robots and new hope to patients with visual impairment.
Feedforward mechanisms used to control machines are much more accurate than feedback mechanisms, but they can be computationally hard. A new method has improved over conventional techniques and is set to be tried out on industrial robots and machine vision.
Most people will be familiar with 'feedback', where a machine such as a thermostat corrects itself after observing an error in performance: once the temperature exceeds a set point, the building's heating system is turned off, for example.
Singapore, 10 June 2020 - Scientists from the SingHealth Duke-NUS Academic Medical Centre (AMC) have developed an interactive web-based atlas of the human immunome, or genes and proteins that make up the immune system. Known as EPIC (Extended Polydimensional Immunome Characterisation), the atlas hosts a comprehensive, expanding immune cell database ranging from cord blood to adult stages, and can be used by the scientific community worldwide to study the mechanisms of immunity. The team's efforts were recently published in the prestigious journal Nature Biotechnology.
Clara Selva Olid, professor at the UOC's Faculty of Psychology and Education Sciences explained: "Informal learning and a culture of unconditional cooperation have given rise to a rapid and brilliant response from different healthcare bodies across the country." According to a recent study published in the Journal of Workplace Learning in which Clara Selva Olid participated, this informal knowledge exchange is much more valuable than it's often given credit for in working environments.
For the first time, FLEET researchers at UNSW, Sydney show the synthesis of ultra-thin graphitic materials at room temperature using organic fuels (which can be as simple as basic alcohols such as ethanol).
Graphitic materials, such as graphene, are ultra-thin sheets of carbon compounds that are sought after materials with great promises for battery storage, solar cells, touch panels and even more recently fillers for polymers.
An article written by an international team of scientists was published recently in Marine Pollution Bulletin magazine. The team included representatives of the Russian Academy of Sciences Shirshov Institute of Oceanology Atlantic Department, the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University, and the Institute of Baltic Sea Research (Warnemunde, Germany). The article was aimed at studying Curonian spit beaches pollution with macro and microplastic. The pollution from both Russian and Lithuanian parts was studied.