Tech
Particle chasing--it's a game that so many physicists play. Sometimes the hunt takes place inside large supercolliders, where spectacular collisions are necessary to find hidden particles and new physics. For physicists studying solids, the game occurs in a much different environment and the sought-after particles don't come from furious collisions. Instead, particle-like entities, called quasiparticles, emerge from complicated electronic interactions that happen deep within a material.
The use of artificial intelligence (AI), technologies that can interact with the environment and simulate human intelligence, has the potential to significantly change the way we work. Successfully integrating AI into organizations depends on workers' level of trust in the technology. A new review examined two decades of research on how people develop trust in AI. The authors concluded that the way AI is represented, or "embodied," and AI's capabilities contribute to developing trust.
A study conducted by two associate professors of marketing at The University of Texas at Arlington shows that people are more likely to base decisions on anecdotal information instead of facts when they feel anxious and vulnerable.
Traci Freling and Ritesh Saini, both in the College of Business, published "When poignant stories outweigh cold hard facts: A meta-analysis of the anecdotal bias" in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.
Dirac matter is an intriguing class of materials with rather peculiar properties: electrons in these materials behave as if they had no mass. The most prominent Dirac material is graphene, but further members have been discovered during the past 15 years or so. Each one of them serves as a rich playground for exploring 'exotic' electronic behaviours, some of which hold the promise to enable novel components for electronics.
Scientists know that coronaviruses, including the SARS-CoV-2 virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, can remain infectious for days -- or even longer -- in sewage and drinking water.
Modern scientific research on materials relies heavily on exploring their behavior at the atomic and molecular scales. For that reason, scientists are constantly on the hunt for new and improved methods for data gathering and analysis of materials at those scales.
According to data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), groundwater supplies half of the world's population with fresh water and makes up 43% of the water used in irrigation. Despite its importance, it is calculated that about a third of the world's greatest aquifers are drying up quickly and that 20% are being overexploited. In Spain, a country where a large number of crops are watered with groundwater, scientific data show that the extraction rate is much higher than the water replenishing rate.
Melatonin controls the body clock - high melatonin levels make us feel tired in the evening. However, the hormone also plays an important role in animals' biological rhythms. Artificial light at night - light pollution - can suppress the production of melatonin in fish, even at very low light intensities, a finding established by researchers from the Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB).
Researchers at Linköping University, together with colleagues in China, have developed a tiny unit that is both an optical transmitter and a receiver. "This is highly significant for the miniaturisation of optoelectronic systems", says LiU professor Feng Gao.
Chunxiong Bao, postdoc at Linköping University, types in a sentence on a computer screen, and the same sentence immediately appears on the neighbouring screen, optically transferred from one diode to another. The diode is made from perovskite, one of a large family of materials defined by their special crystal structure.
MADISON, Wis. -- In the future, treating a concussion could be as simple as cooling the brain.
That's according to research conducted by University of Wisconsin-Madison engineers, whose findings support the treatment approach at the cellular level.
Nearly 2 million years ago, three hominin genera - Australopithecus, Paranthropus and the earliest Homo erectus lineage - lived as contemporaries in the karst landscape of what is now South Africa, according to a new geochronological evaluation of the hominin fossil-rich Drimolen Paleocave complex. Combined with other evidence, authors Andy Herries et al.
Addressing a major source of uncertainty in glacier-flow models, researchers present a new slip law to describe glaciers sliding on soft, deformable material. The findings may help create a universal slip law that could be used to constrain the models of the glaciers and ice sheets that could have the greatest potential impacts on global sea-level rise. Glaciers slip, slide and surge over a wide variety of terrain, ranging from solid bedrock (hard-bedded) to loose gravel-like sediments (soft-bedded).
In a Policy Forum, Charlie Wilson and colleagues explore the potential advantages of "granular" energy technologies - small-scale, lower-cost and modular technologies - for accelerating the low-carbon transformation of our global energy system. Opposed to the mainstream "bigger is better" upscaling of technology and infrastructure, Wilson et al. present new data and analyses demonstrating the benefits of granular energy technologies.
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology are the first to describe different emotional facial expressions for mice. Similar to humans, the face of a mouse looks completely different when it tastes something sweet or bitter, or when it becomes anxious. With this new possibility to render the emotions of mice measurable, neurobiologists can now investigate the basic mechanisms of how emotions are generated and processed in the brain.