Tech

Kyoto, Japan -- Researchers have found that fish oil transforms fat-storage cells into fat-burning cells, which may reduce weight gain in middle age.

The team explains in Scientific Reports that fish oil activates receptors in the digestive tract, fires the sympathetic nervous system, and induces storage cells to metabolize fat.

What happens to the land when a ski run is abandoned? Not much, if the run was previously graded, according to a study from the University of California, Davis.

The study, published online Dec. 16 in the Journal of Applied Ecology, evaluated six abandoned ski areas in the Northern Sierra region of California and Nevada. It found that runs that were graded showed no predictable recovery even 40 years after abandonment. With graded runs, heavy machinery is used to remove vegetation, boulders and, consequently, much of the topsoil and seed bank during construction.

There's more to an ecosystem than the visible plants and animals. The soil underneath is alive with vital microbes. They make sure nutrients from dead plant and animal material are broken down and made useable by other plants. This completes the process of nutrient cycling and carbon storage.

Scientists are learning more about how important these microbes are. But how do changes in temperature and precipitation levels affect microbes? And will that affect carbon storage?

ETH Professor Martin Fussenegger calls them molecular prosthetics: cells with specially developed gene circuits that can be implanted into an organism, where they take over metabolic functions that the organism cannot perform itself. Fussenegger and his team at ETH Zurich's Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering in Basel have now succeeded in developing a molecular prosthesis of this kind where the functions are far more complex than before. The prosthesis is tailored to the treatment of psoriasis, a complex and chronic inflammatory disease of the skin.

At a press conference held on Friday Dec. 11, 2015 in the Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam, archaeologist Nico Roymans from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam announced a discovery that is truly unique for Dutch archaeology: the location where the Roman general and statesman Julius Caesar massacred two Germanic tribes in the year 55 BC. The location of this battle, which Caesar wrote about in detail in Book IV of his De Bello Gallico, was unknown to date. It is the earliest known battle on Dutch soil.

BOULDER, Colo.--Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have added to their collection of ingredients for future quantum computers by performing logic operations--basic computing steps--with two atoms of different elements. This hybrid design could be an advantage in large computers and networks based on quantum physics.

Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley have demonstrated that diamonds may hold the key to the future for nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technologies

Wearable power sources for wearable electronics are limited by the size of garments.

With that in mind, researchers at Case Western Reserve University have developed flexible wire-shaped microsupercapacitors that can be woven into a jacket, shirt or dress.

By their design or by connecting the capacitors in series or parallel, the devices can be tailored to match the charge storage and delivery needs of electronics donned.

It's not every day that there's a news story about socks. But in November, a pair won the Best New Wearable Technology Device Award at a Silicon Valley conference. The smart socks, which track foot landings and cadence, are at the forefront of a new generation of wearable electronics, according to an article in Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society.

The 2015 Monitoring the Future survey (MTF) shows decreasing use of a number of substances, including cigarettes, alcohol, prescription opioid pain relievers, and synthetic cannabinoids ("synthetic marijuana"). Other drug use remains stable, including marijuana, with continued high rates of daily use reported among 12th graders, and ongoing declines in perception of its harms.

Daejeon, Republic of Korea, Dec. 16, 2015 -- When a fake phone company released its line of products, NoPhones, a thin, rectangular-shaped plastic block that looked just like a smartphone but did not function, many doubted that the simulated smartphones would find any users. Surprisingly, close to 4,000 fake phones were sold to consumers who wanted to curb their phone usage.

As smartphones penetrate every facet of our daily lives, a growing number of people have expressed concern about distractions or even the addictions they suffer from overusing smartphones.

A bit of stray moisture during an experiment tipped off scientists about the strange behavior of a complex oxide material they were studying--shedding light on its potential for improving chemical sensors, computing and information storage. In the presence of a water molecule on its surface, the layered material emits ultraviolet light from its interior.

The movement of charge carriers perpendicular to an electric driving field - even without a magnetic field - constitutes one of the most intriguing properties of carriers in solids. This anomalous velocity is at the origin of fascinating physical phenomena - with the spin Hall effect and the anomalous Hall effect being two prominent examples - and might be important for future spintronic applications or even new quantum computers.

A nanotechnology breakthrough from DTU revolutionizes laser printing technology, allowing you to print high-resolution data and colour images of unprecedented quality and microscopic dimensions.

Using this new technology, DTU researchers from DTU Nanotech and DTU Fotonik have reproduced a colour image of Mona Lisa which is less than one pixel on an iPhone Retina display. The laser technology allows printing in a mind-blowing resolution of 127,000 DPI. In comparison, weekly or monthly magazines are normally printed in a resolution equivalent to 300 DPI.

Researchers have developed a revolutionary new app to capture accurate global cause of death data on tablets and mobile phones.

Worldwide, two in three deaths - 35 million each year - are unregistered. Around 180 countries that are home to 80 per cent of the world's population do not collect reliable cause of death statistics.

The app is the result of a decade-long global collaboration, led by the University of Melbourne and researchers at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington.