Tech
Tsukuba, Japan - Many algae and plant species contain photosynthetic membrane-bound organelles called plastids that are actually remnants of a free-living cyanobacterium. At some point in evolutionary history, a cyanobacterium was engulfed by an ancestral alga, trapping it forever as a host-controlled endosymbiont in a process called organellogenesis. All modern algae and plants are the descendants of this ancestral alga containing the first plastid.
Nagoya University scientists have developed a one-step fabrication process that improves the ability of nanocarbons to remove toxic heavy metal ions from water. The findings, published in the journal ACS Applied Nano Materials, could aid efforts to improve universal access to clean water.
Polymers that are good conductors of electricity could be useful in biomedical devices, to help with sensing or electrostimulation, for example. But there has been a sticking point preventing their widespread use: their inability to adhere to a surface such as a sensor or microchip, and stay put despite moisture from the body.
Now, researchers at MIT have come up with a way of getting conductive polymer gels to adhere to wet surfaces.
Researchers at Stanford University have developed a new device for connecting the brain directly to silicon-based technologies. While brain-machine interface devices already exist - and are used for prosthetics, disease treatment and brain research - this latest device can record more data while being less intrusive than existing options.
Glasses used for camera lenses or reading glasses are not like those used to make windshields. They have a different degree of transparency and they break in a different way (the former break in large pieces, the latter in a multitude of tiny pieces). The techniques to obtain glasses with specific properties have long been known to the industry: a slow process for optical applications, tempering for glasses designed to break safely. These procedures determine the stress within the glass, which can therefore be easily minimized or maximized.
A previously unknown and significant source of carbon just discovered in the Arctic has scientists both marveling at a once overlooked contributor to local coastal ecosystems and concerned about what it may mean in an era of climate change.
More and more, people are using internet forums as first place to look for information on health issues. However, the scientific medical information being provided there is often so complex that laypeople are barely able to form considered judgements on the content of much of the advice. One criterion which users apply instead in evaluating the information is the style of the language used. This is the result of the research carried out by psychologists at the University of Münster (Germany).
The growing threat of drought and rising water demand have made accurate forecasts of crop water use critical for farmland water management and sustainability.
But limitations in existing models and satellite data pose challenges for precise estimates of evapotranspiration -- a combination of evaporation from soil and transpiration from plants. The process is complex and difficult to model, and existing remote-sensing data can't provide accurate, high-resolution information on a daily basis.
Below please find links to new coronavirus-related content published today in Annals of Internal Medicine. All coronavirus-related content published in Annals of Internal Medicine is free to the public. A complete collection is available at https://annals.org/aim/pages/coronavirus-content.
Also new in this issue:
Oncotarget Volume 11, Issue 11 reported that in order to understand the molecular mechanism of the dependency in MM, the research team examined gene expression changes upon DOT1L inhibition in sensitive and insensitive cell lines and discovered that genes belonging to the endoplasmic reticulum stress pathway and protein synthesis machinery were specifically suppressed in sensitive cells.
Today, when new drugs are designed with the help of supercomputers, and electronic devices operate on a nanoscale, it is very important for scientists to understand how neighboring molecules behave towards each other. For this purpose, they need to know the sizes of atoms with the highest degree of precision. Modern quantum chemistry methods can be of help here, but the answers they offer are either not accurate enough or take months of work to produce.
Electrocatalysis is one of the most studied topics in the field of material science, because it is extensively involved in many important energy-related processes, such as the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) for fuel cells, the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) for green hydrogen production, and the oxygen evolution reaction (OER) for metal-air batteries. Noble metal aerogels (NMAs) emerge as a new class of outstanding electrocatalysts due to the combined features of metals and aerogels.
While Rancho La Brea, commonly known as the La Brea Tar Pits, is famous for its thousands of bones of large extinct mammals, big insights are coming from small fossils, thanks to new excavation and chemical techniques.
In the past decade, on-chip nanophotonics has attracted increasing attention for the realization of integrated photonic circuits with faster operation, broader bandwidth, lower power consumption and higher compactness. While a number of on-chip nanophotonic devices and circuits have been successfully fabricated using a complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) -compatible technique, on-chip light sources remain challenging. On the other hand, bottom-up grown semiconductor nanowires have long been used for nanoscale waveguide lasers.
In a new publication from Cardiovascular Innovations and Applications; DOI https://doi.org/10.15212/CVIA.2019.0569, Lutfu Askin, Kader Eliz Uzel, Okan Tanriverdi and Serdar Turkmen from the Department of Cardiology, Adiyaman Education and Research Hospital, Adiyaman, Turkey consider serum irisin pathogenesis and clinical research in cardiovascular diseases.