WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. -- Computer chips use billions of tiny switches, called transistors, to process information. The more transistors on a chip, the faster the computer.

A material shaped like a one-dimensional DNA helix might further push the limits on a transistor's size. The material comes from a rare earth element called tellurium.

Scientists at Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) and Socionext Inc. have designed the world's smallest all-digital phase-locked loop (PLL). PLLs are critical clocking circuits in virtually all digital applications, and reducing their size and improving their performance is a necessary step to enabling the development of next-generation technologies.

"The last two decades have seen significant growth in the spread of tools to classify and measure urban performance (rankings, indexes, etc.) across both the public and private institutions that use them, in response to different types of pressures encouraging uniformity. Naturally, all these tools are useful for guiding and assessing the policies implemented by local authorities in various fields of action, and are particularly prolific in the area of sustainability.

As the coronavirus outbreak expands, public health officials are trying to anticipate its trajectory and the rate at which it will travel. Now, scientists have created a new analysis able to predict the speed of epidemics in a network. By employing a simple approach commonly used to monitor how messages pass through communication networks, Moore and Rogers were able to theoretically predict contagion speeds in different networks, down to individual nodes. Their model also provides a way to assess each node's likelihood of being infected by a certain particular time in the epidemic.

A scrupulous gatekeeper stands between the brain and its circulatory system to let in the good and keep out the bad, but this porter, called the blood-brain barrier, also blocks trial drugs to treat diseases like Alzheimer's or cancer from getting into the brain.

What if we could replace a patient's damaged blood vessels with brand new ones produced in a laboratory? This is the challenge set by Inserm researcher Nicolas L'Heureux, who is working on the human extracellular matrix - the structural support of human tissues that is found around practically all of the body's cells.

Cancer research using experimental models--everything from cancer cells in a dish to patient tumors transplanted in mice--has been extremely useful for learning more about the disease and how we might treat it. For some cancers, however, these models have failed to provide sufficient insight for medical progress. Diffuse glioma, the most common malignant brain tumor, is a prominent example, and it continues to have near-universal rates of recurrence and poor patient prognoses.

Tropical Cyclone Damien made landfall on Feb. 9 along the northern Pilbara coast of Western Australia. On Feb. 10, the GPM or Global Precipitation Measurement mission core satellite analyzed the rainfall generated by the remnants that triggered warnings.

Boulder, Colo., USA: In Australia, the onset of human occupation (about 65,000 years?) and dispersion across the continent are the subjects of intense debate and are critical to understanding global human migration routes. A lack of ceramic artifacts and permanent structures has resulted in a scarcity of dateable archaeological sites older than about 10,000 years.

Plants that break some of the 'rules' of ecology by adapting in unconventional ways may have a higher chance of surviving climate change, according to researchers from the University of Queensland and Trinity College Dublin.

Dr Annabel Smith, from UQ's School of Agriculture and Food Sciences, and Professor Yvonne Buckley, from UQ's School of Biological Sciences and Trinity College Dublin Ireland, studied the humble plantain (Plantago lanceolate) to see how it became one of the world's most successfully distributed plant species.