Tech
With water scarcity a growing problem worldwide, University of California, Berkeley, researchers are close to producing a microwave-sized water harvester that will allow you to pull all the water you need directly from the air -- even in the hot, dry desert.
The perceived speed of a surface moving across the skin depends on texture, with some textures fooling us into thinking that an object is moving faster than it is, according to a study published August 27 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Sliman Bensmaia of the University of Chicago, and colleagues. The researchers explore the basis for this tactile illusion and show that texture-dependent speed perception is determined by the responses of a specific type of nerve fiber in the skin.
Natural Killer (NK) cells have long been the soldiers of the immune system that prevents the growth and spread of cancers, and subduing this army of cells is one of the key ways that tumours take hold.
The series of 34 small earthquakes between April 2018 and May 2019 occurred within 10 km of two active oil extraction sites at Brockham and Horse Hill in Surrey.
Many residents of Newdigate, Dorking, Horley and Charlwood in Surrey, and Crawley and Horsham in West Sussex, felt the largest quake, which reached a magnitude of 3.2.[4]
As the British Isles don't lie along boundaries separating two tectonic plates, earthquakes that are felt by people are relatively rare - so there was concern that the swarm was triggered by nearby drilling and extraction.
Newly formed Tropical Depression 6 in the Atlantic Ocean may have just formed, but it did so under adverse atmospheric conditions. The depression is battling wind shear and it's apparent on imagery from NASA's Aqua satellite.
Wind shear is a measure of how the speed and direction of winds change with altitude. When outside winds batter a tropical cyclone, it affects its circulation. A less circular storm tends to slow down in its spin and weaken.
Tropical Storm Dorian was approaching the Leeward Islands when NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite passed overhead from space and snapped a visible image of the storm. When Suomi NPP came by again the satellite provided a night-time image from early morning on Aug. 27.
The Leeward Islands are a group of islands in the eastern Caribbean Sea, where the sea meets the western Atlantic Ocean. The Leewards extend from the Virgin Islands east of Puerto Rico, southeast to Guadeloupe and its dependencies.
Tropical Depression 13W, now named Podul, was crossing the Philippines from east to west as NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite provided a visible image of the storm.
Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a technique for measuring speed and distance in indoor environments, which could be used to improve navigation technologies for robots, drones - or pedestrians trying to find their way around an airport. The technique uses a novel combination of Wi-Fi signals and accelerometer technology to track devices in near-real time.
When there is a combination of population increase, wastewater discharge, agricultural fertilization, and climate change, the cocktail is detrimental to humans and animals. This harmful cocktail produces harmful algal blooms, and many of these are toxic to humans and wildlife.
It costs more than a new iPhone XS, and it's made out of hazelnut shrub stems. Traditional baby baskets of Northern California's Yurok and Karuk tribes come at a premium not only because they are handcrafted by skilled weavers, but because the stems required to make them are found only in forest understory areas experiencing a type of controlled burn once practiced by the tribes but suppressed for more than a century.
UCLA engineers have made major improvements on their design of an optical neural network -a device inspired by how the human brain works - that can identify objects or process information at the speed of light.
The development could lead to intelligent camera systems that figure out what they are seeing simply by the patterns of light that run through a 3D engineered material structure. Their new design takes advantage of the parallelization and scalability of optical-based computational systems.
WASHINGTON, D.C., August 27, 2019 -- Scientists are using nanoparticle screening on personal care products and finding previously thought toxic chemicals may not be harmful.
In a paper published in Biomicrofluidics, from AIP Publishing, researchers successfully used microchips to demonstrate titanium dioxide, a chemical found in most sunscreens, not only is nontoxic but also offers protection against ultraviolet damage to skin cells.
Powerful electronic components are indispensable for future communications, for the digital transformation of society and for artificial intelligence applications. On a footprint as small as possible, they should offer low energy consumption and achieve ever higher power densities, thus working more efficiently. This is where conventional devices reach their limits. Scientists all over the world are therefore investigating new materials and components that can meet these requirements.
A previously unknown electrical current develops in the body's cells when the vital fat pump function of the flippases transfers ("flips") lipids from the outer to the inner layer of the body's cell membranes. This electrical current may be important for a range of other cell mechanisms, and in this way also for human well-being and health.
The next generation of waterproof smart fabrics will be laser printed and made in minutes. That's the future imagined by the researchers behind new e-textile technology.
Scientists from RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, have developed a cost-efficient and scaleable method for rapidly fabricating textiles that are embedded with energy storage devices.
In just three minutes, the method can produce a 10x10cm smart textile patch that's waterproof, stretchable and readily integrated with energy harvesting technologies.