Tech

A research team led by the University of California San Diego has discovered the root cause of why lithium metal batteries fail--bits of lithium metal deposits break off from the surface of the anode during discharging and are trapped as "dead" or inactive lithium that the battery can no longer access.

Physicists used to think that superconductivity - electricity flowing without resistance or loss - was an all or nothing phenomenon. But new evidence suggests that, at least in copper oxide superconductors, it's not so clear cut.

HOUSTON -- (Aug. 21, 2019) -- Physicists have found "electron pairing," a hallmark feature of superconductivity, at temperatures and energies well above the critical threshold where superconductivity happens.

UPTON, NY--A team of scientists has collected experimental evidence indicating that a large concentration of electron pairs forms in a copper-oxide (cuprate) material at a much higher temperature than the "critical" one (Tc) at which it becomes superconducting, or able to conduct electricity without energy loss. They also detected these pairs way above the superconducting energy gap, or a range of energies that electrons cannot possess.

August 21, 2019 -- Among adults aged 18 years and older, 31 percent used prescription opioids only as prescribed by a physician medically and 4 percent misused them. Thus, the overwhelming majority (88 percent) of all past-12-month prescription opioid users used the drugs for medical purposes only, according to a new study at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, and the New York State Psychiatric Institute. The findings are published in the American Journal of Public Health.

A team of researchers led by Griffith University has mapped out how much waves are likely to change around the globe under climate change and found that if we can limit warming to 2 degrees, signals of wave climate change are likely to stay within the range of natural climate variability.

However, if we don't limit warming and continue with business as usual, around 48 per cent of the world's coast is at risk of wave climate change, with changes in either wave height, period or direction.

A patient-centered, community-engaged program featuring home visits by nurses and mobile phone links to caregivers works better than traditional adult-focused and patient self-managed care systems for treating and managing pelvic inflammatory disease, or PID, among historically underserved teens and young women, a Johns Hopkins Medicine study shows.

Evolve BioSystems, Inc. today announced new data published this week in Journal of Functional Foods, showing for the first time that term, breastfed infants fed activated Bifidobacterium longum subsp. infantis EVC001 (B. infantis EVC001) experience improved metabolism of protein-bound glycans from human milk, compared to matched controls. Not only do these new data provide greater mechanistic understanding of how B. infantis selectively utilizes the glycans from human milk as growth substrate but may also provide a basis for facilitating B.

Cancer deploys a vast array of resources to grow: from instability in its genome to inflammation, as well as the creation of new blood vessels, the microenvironment surrounding the tumour, and the use of mechanisms that allow it to be immortal, among others. At the National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), the Metabolism and Cell Signalling Group, led by Alejo Efeyan, is studying how cancer uses one of these resources, nutrients, for its own advantage, focusing on an important metabolic pathway coordinated by the mTOR gene.

"Seeing the pictures appear on the computer screen was the best day at work I've ever had," says Simen Ådnøy Ellingsen, an associate professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology's (NTNU) Department of Energy and Process Engineering.

That was the day that PhD candidate Benjamin Keeler Smeltzer and master's student Eirik Æsøy had shown in the lab that Ellingsen was right and sent him the photos from the experiment.

Five years ago, Ellingsen had challenged accepted knowledge from 1887, armed with a pen and paper, and won.

The precision rotary sample table designed at the HZB rotates around its axis at several hundred revolutions per second with extreme precision. The HZB team headed Dr. Francisco García-Moreno combined the rotary sample table with precision optics and achieved a world record of over 25 tomographic images per second using the BESSY II EDDI beamline in 2018.

Human cells - like those of many other organisms - have developed mechanisms to protect us from cancer. Healthy cells produce a suite of molecules that stop harmful mutations from accumulating. The most famous guardian of our genome is the protein p53: whenever p53 becomes inactive or is malfunctioning, the risk of developing cancer increases sharply. MEG3, which has been studied in detail by Marco Marcia and his group at EMBL Grenoble, is another cancer-preventing molecule that our cells produce. Its function arises from stimulating p53.

Despite years of research, the brain still contains broad areas of unchartered territory. A team of scientists, led by neuroscientists from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and University of Sydney, recently found new evidence revising the traditional view of the primate brain's visual system organization using data from marmosets. This remapping of the brain could serve as a future reference for understanding how the highly complex visual system works, and potentially influence the design of artificial neural networks for machine vision.

BINGHAMTON, N.Y. -- Researchers at Binghamton University, State University of New York researchers have found a way to improve the performance of tiny sensors that could have wide-reaching implications for electronic devices we use every day.

The study finds a more reliable way to use actuators that control MEMS (microelectromechanical systems), which are microscopic devices with moving parts that are often produced in the same way as electronics.

Barely hidden from his study participants, William Jou, a former graduate student in mechanical engineering at Stanford University, pulled off a ruse straight out of The Wizard of Oz. Except, instead of impersonating a great and powerful wizard, Jou pretended to be an autonomous sink. He did this to test whether a sink that adapts to personal washing styles could reduce water use.