Tech
Imagine standing in the grocery store, looking at a pile of bananas. On your side of the pile, the manager has posted yesterday's newspaper flyer, showing bananas at 62¢ per pound--so that's what you pay at the register. But on the other side of the pile, there's an up-to-the-minute screen showing that the price of bananas has now dropped to 48¢ per pound--so that's what the guy over there pays. Exact same bananas, but the price you see depends on which aisle you're standing in.
Researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology have managed to grow atomically thin films of molybdenum disulfide spanning up to several tens of square centimeters. It was demonstrated that the material's structure can be modified by varying the synthesis temperature. The films, which are of interest to electronics and optoelectronics, were obtained at 900-1,000 degrees Celsius. The findings were published in the journal ACS Applied Nano Materials.
PITTSBURGH (Jan 22, 2020) -- The internet of things (IoT) widely spans from the smart speakers and Wi-Fi-connected home appliances to manufacturing machines that use connected sensors to time tasks on an assembly line, warehouses that rely on automation to manage inventory, and surgeons who can perform extremely precise surgeries with robots. But for these applications, timing is everything: a lagging connection could have disastrous consequences.
AUSTIN, Texas -- Sign languages throughout North and South America and Europe have centuries-long roots in five European locations, a finding that gives new insight into the influence of the European Enlightenment on many of the world's signing communities and the evolution of their languages.
Increased uptake of plant-based diets in New Zealand could substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions while greatly improving population health and saving the healthcare system billions of dollars in the coming decades, according to a new University of Otago study.
Lead researcher and Otago medical student Jono Drew explains the global food system is driving both the climate crisis and the growing burden of common chronic diseases like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and cancer.
Botanists have long held a fascination for heterotrophic plants, not only because they contradict the notion that autotrophy (photosynthesis) is synonymous with plants, but also because such plants are typically rare and ephemeral. However, it is still a matter of debate as to how these plants obtain nutrition.
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- American households waste, on average, almost a third of the food they acquire, according to economists, who say this wasted food has an estimated aggregate value of $240 billion annually. Divided among the nearly 128.6 million U.S. households, this waste could be costing the average household about $1,866 per year.
This inefficiency in the food economy has implications for health, food security, food marketing and climate change, noted Edward Jaenicke, professor of agricultural economics, College of Agricultural Sciences, Penn State.
Scientists from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) have created a stress-detecting "smart" polymer that shines brighter when stretched. Researchers hope to use the new polymer to measure the performance of synthetic polymers and track the wear and tear on materials used in engineering and construction industries.
The results have been reported today in the first issue of the journal Cell Reports Physical Science. With the so-called Langmuir technique, the authors transfer the material into a 2D system, and thereby circumvent the complex transport processes that influence the degradation of three-dimensional objects. They created analytical models describing different polymer architectures that are of particular interest for the design of multifunctional implants and determined the kinetic parameters that describe the degradation of these materials.
Wannier functions were first introduced by Gregory Wannier in 1937 as an alternative way of describing the electronic ground state of periodic systems. They were linked to Bloch orbitals, the standard method of describing these ground states, by families of transformations in a continuous space of unitary matrices. Unfortunately, this was linked to a large degree of arbitrariness.
With their translucent bells, moon jellyfish (Aurelia aurita) move around the oceans in a very efficient way. Scientists at the University of Bonn have now used a mathematical model to investigate how these cnidarians manage to use their neural networks to control their locomotion even when they are injured. The results may also contribute to the optimization of underwater robots. The study has already been published online in the journal eLife; the final version will appear soon.
Researchers from HSE University, Skoltech and the University of Toronto analyzed data from 190 fMRI studies and found out that food, sex and money implicate similar brain regions whereas different types of reward favor the left and right hemispheres differently. The paper is to be published in Brain Imaging and Behavior.
How would you go about returning books to the correct shelves in a large library with the least amount of walking? How would you determine the shortest route for a truck that has to deliver many packages to multiple cities? These are some examples of the "traveling salesman problem", a type of "combinatorial optimization" problem, which frequently arises in everyday situations. Solving the traveling salesman problem involves searching for the most efficient of all possible routes. To do this easily, we require the help of low-power, high-performance artificial intelligence.
A study funded by the Veterans Administration and directed by researchers at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine has shown few differences in the profiles of genes that influence cognition between people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and the general population. This surprising finding could provide new insights into therapies designed to improve cognition. The study was published in the American Journal of Medical Genetics.
Mammals sweat to regulate body temperature, and researchers from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China are exploring whether our phones could do the same. In a study published January 22 in the journal Joule, the authors present a coating for electronics that releases water vapor to dissipate heat from running devices--a new thermal management method that could prevent electronics from overheating and keep them cooler compared to existing strategies.