Tech

There is more than twice as much carbon in the planet's soils than there is in its atmosphere, so the loss of even a small proportion of that could have a profound feedback effect on the global climate.

Yet in its most recent report, in 2013, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) used models that paid less attention to soil carbon potentially entering the atmosphere than had earlier reports, concluding that there simply wasn't enough evidence about how warmer global temperatures might impact soil carbon stocks.

With the report from Florida Gov. Rick Scott on Monday that 14 people in the state have been infected with the Zika virus most likely through mosquito transmission, the concern about out­breaks in the U.S. has intensified.

The news comes on the heels of new research by Northeastern pro­fessor Alessandro Vespig­nani that can help coun­tries in the Americas plan a response.

EUGENE, Ore. -- Aug. 2, 2016 -- New research finds that airborne bacterial communities differ from one urban park to the next but those of parking lots are alike -- and differ from those of parks in subtle but potentially important ways.

At a glance, such findings seem intuitive. Parks often have different vegetation in them, and asphalt-covered parking lots are much the same -- barren asphalt bombarded by solar radiation as well as heavy metals and fuel from motor vehicles.

Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed a flexible wearable sensor that can accurately measure a person's blood alcohol level from sweat and transmit the data wirelessly to a laptop, smartphone or other mobile device. The device can be worn on the skin and could be used by doctors and police officers for continuous, non-invasive and real-time monitoring of blood alcohol content.

TORONTO, ON - A team of University of Toronto chemists has created a battery that stores energy in a biologically derived unit, paving the way for cheaper consumer electronics that are easier on the environment.

The battery is similar to many commercially-available high-energy lithium-ion batteries with one important difference. It uses flavin from vitamin B2 as the cathode: the part that stores the electricity that is released when connected to a device.

If you want to save on your monthly electric bill and reduce your greenhouse gas emissions at the same time, you might buy a new, energy-efficient refrigerator. Or water heater. Or clothes dryer. But if you can only replace one of these, which will give you the biggest payback?

A team of researchers from the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, the University of Illinois at Chicago and the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have engineered silicon particles one-fiftieth the width of a human hair, which could lead to "biointerface" systems designed to make nerve cells fire and heart cells beat.

Bozhi Tian, who led one of the University of Chicago research groups, said the particles can establish unique biointerfaces on cell membranes, because they are deformable but can still yield a local electrical effect.

WASHINGTON (Aug. 1, 2016) -- New research critical to treatment for chronic toxoplasmosis, one of the most common parasitic diseases worldwide, was published in the Journal of Experimental Medicine. Researchers from the George Washington University (GW) uncovered a connection between CD8 T-cell exhaustion and CD4 T-cell exhaustion, not found before. They also discovered that CD4 T-cells can be regulated by Blimp-1 protein expression. Through regulating CD4 T-cells, CD8 T-cells can be regulated, which could lead to new therapeutic possibilities.

Students at Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences have developed "Ourobot". / Their project was supervised by a professor at the Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences and a CITEC researcher.

Haptics researchers have long known that applying ultrasonic vibrations to a flat, featureless glass plate makes it feel slippery. But they have also long debated why this occurs.

Northwestern University's J. Edward Colgate and his team have finally put the debate -- and mystery -- to rest. They discovered that the vibrations reduce friction by causing the fingertip to bounce on pockets of trapped air.

WASHINGTON, D.C., August 2, 2016 -- Invisibility cloaks have less to do with magic than with metamaterials. These human-engineered materials have properties that don't occur in nature, allowing them to bend and manipulate light in weird ways. For example, some of these materials can channel light around an object so that it appears invisible at a certain wavelength. These materials are also useful in applications such as smaller, faster, and more energy efficient optics, sensors, light sources, light detectors and telecommunications devices.

Archaeological sites speak about the everyday lives of people in other times. Yet knowing how to interpret this reality does not tend to be straightforward. We know that Palaeolithic societies lived on hunting and gathering, but the bones found in prehistoric settlements are not always the food leftovers of the societies that lived in them. Or they are not exclusively that.

Extraordinary things happen to ordinary materials when they are subjected to very high pressure and temperature. Sodium, a conductive metal in normal conditions, becomes a transparent insulator; gaseous hydrogen becomes a solid.

BEER-SHEVA, Israel ... August 1, 2016 -- The first single actuator wave-like robot (SAW) has been developed by engineers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU). The 3D-printed robot can move forward or backward in a wave-like motion, moving much like a worm would in a perpendicular wave. SAW VIDEO

A group of researchers at Immunology Frontier Research Center (IFReC), Osaka University and RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Sciences jointly clarified the mechanism for inducing germinal-center B cells' differentiation into memory B cells, immune cells that remember antigens, at the molecular level.