Tech
Tokyo, Japan -- In the marchland of Japan's Oze National Park, keeping track of the deer population has been a difficult and time-consuming task for the park rangers. Now their lives could get much easier, thanks to a novel technique for tracking deer movements using unmanned listening devices developed by researchers at the Institute of Industrial Science, a part of The University of Tokyo.
Studying the creation and evolution of sulfur-containing compounds in outer space is essential for understanding interstellar chemistry. CS2 is believed to be the most important molecule in comet nuclei, interstellar dust, or ice cores. CS and S2 are the photodissociation fragments of CS2.
The ability to manipulate near-infrared (NIR) radiation has the potential to enable a plethora of technologies not only for the biomedical sector (where the semitransparency of human tissue is a clear advantage) but also for security (e.g. biometrics) and ICT (information and communication technology), with the most obvious application being to (nearly or in)visible light communications (VLCs) and related ramifications, including the imminent Internet of Things (IoT) revolution.
Mass spectrometers are widely used to analyze highly complex chemical and biological mixtures. Skoltech scientists have developed a new version of a mass spectrometer that uses rotation frequencies of ionized molecules in strong magnetic fields to measure masses with higher accuracy (FT ICR). The team has designed an ion trap that ensures the utmost resolving power in ultra-strong magnetic fields. The research was published in the journal Analytical Chemistry.
Skoltech researchers and their colleagues from Russia and Germany have designed an on-chip printed 'electronic nose' that serves as a proof of concept for low-cost and sensitive devices to be used in portable electronics and healthcare. The paper was published in the journal ACS Applied Materials Interfaces.
A genetic engineering method makes it possible to observe how woody cell walls are built in plants. The new research in wood formation, conducted by the University of Copenhagen and others, opens up the possibility of developing sturdier construction materials and perhaps more climate efficient trees.
People with combined vision and hearing loss are nearly four times more likely to experience depression and more than three times more likely to suffer chronic anxiety, according to a new study published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology and led by Anglia Ruskin University (ARU).
Researchers analysed a health survey of 23,089 adults in Spain and found that while people suffering either vision or hearing loss both were more likely to report depression as those that were not, that risk increased to 3.85 times higher when respondents reported problems with both senses combined.
An international team of scientists headed by Grégoire Courtine at EPFL and CHUV and Aaron Phillips at the University of Calgary has developed a treatment that can dramatically improve the lives of patients with a spinal cord injury.
New insight into how human brains detect and perceive different types of touch, such as fluttery vibrations and steady pressures, has been revealed by UCL scientists with the help of the ancient Chinese cooking ingredient, Szechuan pepper.
Humans have many different types of receptor cells in the skin that allow us to perceive different types of touch. For more than a century, scientists have puzzled over whether touch signals from each type of receptor are processed independently by the brain, or whether these different signals interact before reaching conscious perception.
Imagine looking for the optimal configuration to build an organic solar cell made from different polymers. How would you start? Does the active layer need to be very thick, or very thin? Does it need a large or a small amount of each polymer? Knowing how to predict the specific composition and cell design that would result in optimum performance is one of the greatest unresolved problems in materials science. This is, in part, due to the fact that the device performance depends on multiple factors.
Recent events such as the Covid-19 pandemic, locust infestations, drought and labour shortages have disrupted food supply chains, endangering food security in the process. A recent study published in Nature Food shows that trade restrictions and stockpiling of supplies by a few key countries could create global food price spikes and severe local food shortages during times of threat.
A new type of rocket thruster that could take humankind to Mars and beyond has been proposed by a physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL).
The device would apply magnetic fields to cause particles of plasma, electrically charged gas also known as the fourth state of matter, to shoot out the back of a rocket and, because of the conservation of momentum, propel the craft forward. Current space-proven plasma thrusters use electric fields to propel the particles.
Knowing how to predict the specific composition and cell design that would result in optimum performance is one of the greatest unresolved problems in materials science. This is, in part, due to the fact that the device performance depends on multiple factors.
Building on the promise of emerging therapies to deploy the body's "natural killer" immune cells to fight cancer, researchers at the University of Michigan Rogel Cancer Center and U-M College of Engineering have gone one step further.
They've developed what is believed to be the first systematic way to catch natural killer cells and get them to release cancer-killing packets called exosomes. These nano-scale exosomes are thousands of times smaller than natural killer cells -- or NK cells for short -- and thus better able to penetrate cancer cells' defenses.
Seawater makes up about 96% of all water on earth, making it a tempting resource to meet the world's growing need for clean drinking water and carbon-free energy. And scientists already have the technical ability to both desalinate seawater and split it to produce hydrogen, which is in demand as a source of clean energy.
But existing methods require multiple steps performed at high temperatures over a lengthy period of time in order to produce a catalyst with the needed efficiency. That requires substantial amounts of energy and drives up the cost.