Tech

Researchers are developing instruments and methods for measuring the ages of rocks encountered during space missions to the Moon or other planets. Many of the techniques used to date rocks on Earth are not practical in spaceflight, but a technique called laser ablation resonance ionization mass spectrometry can avoid the need for sophisticated sample preparation.

10 percent of health care providers write an antibiotic prescription for nearly every patient (95 percent or more) who walks in with a cold, bronchitis or other acute respiratory infection (ARI), according to a new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-supported study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine and led by the Veterans Affairs Salt Lake City Health Care System and the University of Utah. The figure is at one end of a spectrum showing the remarkable variation in how providers use antibiotics.

Research from North Carolina State University shows that lightweight composite metal foams are effective at blocking X-rays, gamma rays and neutron radiation, and are capable of absorbing the energy of high impact collisions. The finding means the metal foams hold promise for use in nuclear safety, space exploration and medical technology applications.

Titanium and gold are usually not magnetic and cannot be magnets – unless you combine them just so. Scientists at Rice University did so and discovered what is a first of its kind: an itinerant antiferromagnetic metal -- TiAu -- made from nonmagnetic constituent elements.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has given rise to machines that can match humans at chess, rival them in the stock market, and aid them in the clinic. But researchers' ultimate goal is to create a well-rounded, human-like computer program -- an aspiration that raises many questions and poses a wide range of challenges. In Science magazine, researchers discuss recent progress in AI, along with its potential implications for humankind.

A collaborative team from The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and the National Institutes of Health have developed an inhalable vaccine that protects primates against Ebola. The findings were recently published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

DVDs and Blu-ray disks contain so-called phase-change materials that morph from one atomic state to another after being struck with pulses of laser light, with data "recorded" in those two atomic states. Using ultrafast laser pulses that speed up the data recording process, Caltech researchers adopted a novel technique, ultrafast electron crystallography (UEC), to visualize directly in four dimensions the changing atomic configurations of the materials undergoing the phase changes.

Healing times for skin ulcers and bedsores can be reduced by a third with the use of low-intensity ultrasound, scientists from the University of Sheffield and University of Bristol have found.

Researchers from the University of Sheffield's Department of Biomedical Science discovered the ultrasound transmits a vibration through the skin and wakes up cells in wounds helping to stimulate and accelerate the healing process.

More than 200,000 patients in the UK suffer with chronic wounds every year at a cost of over £3.1 billion to the NHS.

Random-access memory, or RAM, is where computers like to store the data they're working on. A processor can retrieve data from RAM tens of thousands of times more rapidly than it can from the computer's disk drive.

But in the age of big data, data sets are often much too large to fit in a single computer's RAM. The data describing a single human genome would take up the RAM of somewhere between 40 and 100 typical computers.

Groundbreaking work at two Department of Energy national laboratories has confirmed plutonium's magnetism, which scientists have long theorized but have never been able to experimentally observe. The advances that enabled the discovery hold great promise for materials, energy and computing applications.

Athletes who've had lower extremity surgeries before going on to play in college, might be at a higher risk for another surgery independent of gender and sport, say researchers presenting their work today at the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine's (AOSSM) Annual Meeting in Orlando, FL.

Children with a rare type of cancer called Wilms' tumor who are at low risk of relapsing can now be given less intensive treatment, avoiding a type of chemotherapy that can cause irreversible heart problems in later life.

The move follows the results of a Cancer Research UK trial, published in the Lancet, showing that the drug doxorubicin can be safely omitted from treatment without affecting patients' chances of survival.

Using gene therapy, researchers at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School have restored hearing in mice with a genetic form of deafness. Their work, published online July 8 by the journal Science Translational Medicine, could pave the way for gene therapy in people with hearing loss caused by genetic mutations.

Each cell in the body contains a whole genome, yet the data packed into a few DNA molecules could fill a hard drive. As more people have their DNA sequenced, that data will require massive computational and storage capabilities beyond anything previously anticipated, says a new assessment from computational biologists and computer scientists at the University of Illinois and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

Nitrous oxide, commonly known as "laughing gas," has been used in anesthesiology practice since the 1800s, but the way it works to create altered states is not well understood. In a study published this week in Clinical Neurophysiology, MIT researchers reveal some key brainwave changes among patients receiving the drug.