Tech
Imagine a world in which electricity could flow through the grid without any losses or where all the data in the world could be stored in the cloud without the need for power stations. This seems unimaginable but a path towards such a dream has opened with the discovery of a new family of materials with magical properties.
They can make tiny cell structures visible: cutting-edge light microscopes offer resolutions of a few tenths of a nanometre--in other words, a millionth of a millimetre. Until now, super-resolution microscopes were much slower than conventional methods, because more or finer image data had to be recorded. Together with partners from Jena, researchers from Bielefeld University have now developed the super-resolution SR-SIM process further.
WACO, Texas (Sept. 19, 2019) - Storytelling that educates and entertains - aka "edutainment" - is a powerful communications tool that can lead to positive health-related changes among multicultural millennials, according to a new marketing study from Baylor University.
TUCSON, Ariz. and WASHINGTON, September 20, 2019 -- The Critical Path Institute (C-Path) and the National Organization for Rare Disorders® (NORD) launched the Rare Disease Cures Accelerator-Data and Analytics Platform (RDCA-DAP) in Rockville, MD on Tuesday, Sept. 17. The platform, funded by a cooperative agreement through the Food and Drug Administration, [Critical Path Public-Private Partnerships Grant Number U18 FD005320], will provide data and analytics to aid in the understanding of rare diseases and to inform long-term drug development and support innovative trial designs.
Additive manufacturing (AM), also known as three-dimensional printing, is a process that fabricates parts in a layer-by-layer manner by adding and processing materials. Advancements in AM technology have enabled the processing of a wide range of materials to create products in varying scales which span from medical implants to aircraft engine parts. These products, which can be rich in shape, material, hierarchical and functional complexities, offer high potential to revolutionize existing product development processes.
At JST Strategic Basic Research Programs, the research group led by associate professor Yuya Oaki and graduate student (at the time) Hiromichi Numazawa of Faculty of Science and Technology, Keio University established a new design policy for organic materials for the anode of lithium-ion secondary cells in a joint work with research associate Yasuhiko Igarashi of Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, The University of Tokyo, through the use of Materials Informatics (MI)1). A high-capacity and high-stability material was successfully obtained via an extremely small number of experiments.
Every vertebrate, whatever its eventual form, starts embryonic life in the same way - as a hollow ball or disc of cells called a blastula. In theory, knowing the mechanism through which the blastula is formed into the shape of an animal could help correct defects and even, one day, regenerate body parts. But evolution and genetics are of little help in understanding this process. Now, however, Vincent Fleury and Ameya Vaishnavi Murukutla from Université Paris Diderot, Paris, France have used experiments with chicken embryos to propose a mechanism for vertebrate limb formation.
As many people will remember from school science classes, bacteria growing on solid surfaces form colonies that can be easily visible to the naked eye. Each of these is a complex biological system in its own right; colonies display collective behaviours that indicate a kind of 'social intelligence' and grow in fractal patterns that can resemble snowflakes. Despite this complexity, colony growth can be modelled using principles of basic physics.
Researchers from the Institute of Microbiology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have reported a novel biophotovoltaics (BPV) system based on a synthetic microbial consortium with constrained electron flow. This BPV system can stably operate for more than 40 days, setting a new BPV longevity milestone, according to a recent article in Nature Communications.
Lack of oxygen, or hypoxia, is a biological stressor that occurs under various conditions such as wound healing and stroke. To rescue the tissue, the body has innate mechanisms that "kick in" to make the cells of the hypoxic tissue more resistant and assist in tissue repair. One such mechanism is the expression of a protein called Hypoxia Induction Factor (HIF), which controls several processes such as glucose uptake, growth of blood vessels and cell proliferation.
AUGUSTA, Ga. (Sept. 20, 2019) - A big way chemotherapy works is by prompting cancer cells to commit suicide, and scientists have found a pathway the most common lung cancer walks to avoid death.
Scientists at the Medical College of Georgia and Georgia Cancer Center at Augusta University have found a first step appears to be lung cancer cells expressing high levels of the molecule TIMP-1, classically considered a tumor inhibitor but at high levels already associated with a poor prognosis for patients.
New research presented at this year's Annual Meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) in Barcelona, Spain (16-20 September) shows that usage of angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors to lower blood pressure, is associated with a 24% reduced risk of developing type 2 diabetes (T2D) when compared with placebo.
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. -- How long the battery of your phone or computer lasts depends on how many lithium ions can be stored in the battery's negative electrode material. If the battery runs out of these ions, it can't generate an electrical current to run a device and ultimately fails.
Materials with a higher lithium ion storage capacity are either too heavy or the wrong shape to replace graphite, the electrode material currently used in today's batteries.
Tropical Storm Tapah formed quickly in the northwestern Pacific Ocean and as it was strengthening from a depression to a tropical storm, the Global Precipitation Measurement mission or GPM core satellite passed overhead from its orbit in space and measured rainfall rates throughout the storm.
NASA has the unique capability of peering under the clouds in storms and measuring the rate in which rain is falling. The GPM's core satellite passed over Tropical Storm Tapah in the northwestern Pacific Ocean on Sept. 16 at 12:11 p.m. EDT (1611 UTC).
Just as mathematics reveals the motions of the stars and the rhythms of nature, it can also shed light on the more mundane decisions of everyday life. Where to park your car, for example, is the subject of a new look at a classic optimization problem by physicists Paul Krapivsky (Boston University) and Sidney Redner (Santa Fe Institute) published in this week's Journal of Statistical Mechanics.