Tech

Some adhesives may soon have a metallic sheen and be particularly easy to unstick. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart are suggesting gallium as just such a reversible adhesive. By inducing slight changes in temperature, they can control whether a layer of gallium sticks or not. This is based on the fact that gallium transitions from a solid state to a liquid state at around 30 degrees Celsius.

Chemists at the Complutense University of Madrid have developed a method that allows brewers to measure the freshness of beer, using a polymer sensor that changes colour upon detecting furfural, a compound that appears when this beverage ages and gives it a stale flavour. The sensor can be controlled from a smartphone app also created by the team.

(Boston)-- Transplanting a preformed dense and coherent sheet of regenerative stem cells directly onto damaged heart, cartilage or bone tissue of ailing patients often is a more promising route to recovery than transplanting the cells just loosely mixed together. The challenge in obtaining intact cell sheets, however, lies in releasing them from the substrate they are grown on in the culture dish quickly and without affecting their efficiency.

New research from North Carolina State University finds that bees in urban areas stick to a flower-nectar diet, steering clear of processed sugars found in soda and other junk food.

Scientists have developed a new type of graphene-based transistor and using modelling they have demonstrated that it has ultralow power consumption compared with other similar transistor devices. The findings have been published in a paper in the journal Scientific Reports. The most important effect of reducing power consumption is that it enables the clock speed of processors to be increased. According to calculations, the increase could be as high as two orders of magnitude.

In interacting with humans, robots must first and foremost be safe. If a household robot, for example, encounters a human, it should not continue its movements regardless, but rather give way in case of doubt. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart are now presenting a motion system - a so-called elastic actuator - that is compliant and can be integrated in robots thanks to its space-saving design. The actuator works with hyperelastic membranes that surround air-filled chambers.

Chemists at Syracuse University have come up with an innovative new way to visualize and monitor chemical reactions in real time.

Members of the Maye Research Group in the Department of Chemistry have designed a nanomaterial that changes color when it interacts with ions and other small molecules during a chemical reaction.

The subject of an article in ACS Nano (American Chemical Society, 2016), their discovery enables researchers to monitor reactions qualitatively with the naked eye and quantitatively with simple instrumentation.

PITTSBURGH--Clutter is a special challenge for robots, but new Carnegie Mellon University software is helping robots cope, whether they're beating a path across the Moon or grabbing a milk jug from the back of the refrigerator.

The software not only helped a robot deal efficiently with clutter, it surprisingly revealed the robot's creativity in solving problems.

A parmesan scandal reported earlier this year highlighted how easy it is to doctor the cheese when it's grated. For producers and consumers of some of the most expensive kinds, this is a big problem. Generic versions abound, but the traditional variety comes from only a handful of Italian provinces and commands twice the price. Now scientists report in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry a way to catch adulteration of the regional products.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Student loan debt may negatively impact young people's ability to accumulate wealth after they graduate or drop out of college, a new study suggests.

People who had outstanding balances on their student loans when they graduated or dropped out of college had lower net worth, fewer financial and nonfinancial assets, and homes with lower market values when they reached age 30, according to a paper accepted for publication in the journal Children and Youth Services Review.

Applying a suite of geographical information system (GIS) tools can improve monitoring for elephant poaching, according to Penn State researchers. Investigating Tsavo, a region in southwest Kenya that is home to that country's largest elephant population, the researchers tried to identify methods that local conservation groups could use to reduce poaching.

Electricity plays a key role in cell studies, but practical issues linked with the shape of the laboratory cultureware have troubled this research. Laboratory cultureware are the plastic containers used by researchers to grow cells. These containers are typically shallow cylinders: a classic example is a petri dish. While a petri dish is circular, the simplest way to create a uniform electric field is based on a rectangular shape.

Rutgers is taking a leading role in an IBM-sponsored World Community Grid project that will use supercomputing power to identify potential drug candidates to cure the Zika virus.

The project, known as OpenZika, employs a global team of scientists who will perform "virtual" experiments in a search of treatments for the fast-spreading virus that the World Health Organization has declared a global public health emergency.

Mitochon Pharmaceuticals today announced completion of its second year of funding with a total investment of $1.6 million. The proceeds from the financing will be used to advance Mitochon’s lead compound MP101, a first in class mitochondrial targeted neuro-protective agent, into human studies, as well as, further develop MP201 for IND filing.

Higher intakes of boiled, baked, or mashed potatoes, and French fries is associated with an increased risk of developing high blood pressure (hypertension) in adult women and men, according to a study published by The BMJ today.

The US-based researchers suggest that replacing one serving a day of boiled, baked, or mashed potatoes with one serving of a non-starchy vegetable is associated with a lower risk of developing hypertension.