WASHINGTON, Nov. 2—In the emerging field of tissue engineering, scientists encourage cells to grow on carefully designed support scaffolds. The ultimate goal is to create living structures that might one day be used to replace lost or damaged tissue, but the manufacture of appropriately detailed scaffolds presents a significant challenge that has kept most tissue engineering applications confined to the research lab.
Tech
Solar power may be on the rise, but solar cells are only as efficient as the amount of sunlight they collect. Under the direction of a new professor at Northwestern University's McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, researchers have developed a new material that absorbs a wide range of wavelengths and could lead to more efficient and less expensive solar technology.
As soon as DNA is mentioned, we automatically think of biology and living beings. It is the DNA molecule found inside each and every cell that holds the encoded blueprints for humans, animals or plants. But factories too have a master plan of this kind. All modern manufacturing facilities resemble living organisms in their complex structure. And, just as in biology, all their constituent parts are linked to one another and have to be painstakingly coordinated.
When fat, sugar and gluten come out of salad dressings, sauces, cookies, beverages, and other foods with the new genre of package labels shouting what's not there, what goes into "light" or "-free" versions of products to make them taste like the original version? The answers appear in the cover story in the current edition of Chemical & Engineering News, ACS' weekly newsmagazine.
A flying robot as small as a dinner plate that can zoom to hard-to-reach places and a fleet of eco-friendly robotic farm-hands are just two of the exciting projects the robotics team at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), based in Brisbane, Australia, is working on.
The pint-sized propellor-powered robots can be packed away into a suitcase. They have multiple cameras which enable them to 'see' the world around them as they navigate their way through buildings, carrying out tasks like deliveries or inspections.
Piroska Östlin of the WHO, Copenhagen, Denmark and colleagues argue in this week's PLoS Medicine that a paradigm shift is needed to keep the focus on health equity within the social determinants of health research agenda. The authors recommend four priority areas for future research on health equity, and suggest possible steps for advancing such an agenda, such as creating a critical mass of researchers and refining norms and standards for the monitoring and assessment of health inequalities.
Cambridge, Mass. -- Americans spend upwards of $40 billion a year on dieting advice and self-help books, but the first step in any healthy eating strategy is basic awareness -- what's on the plate.
If keeping a food diary seems like too much effort, despair not: computer scientists at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have devised a tool that lets you snap a photo of your meal and let the crowd do the rest.
Drying of northern wetlands has led to much more severe peatland wildfires and nine times as much carbon released into the atmosphere, according to new research led by a University of Guelph professor.
The study, published today in Nature Communications, is the first to investigate the effect of drainage on carbon accumulation in northern peatlands and the vulnerability of that carbon to burning.
Paul Blom and Ton van Mol from the Holst Centre in Eindhoven have a way of creating thin, flexible sheets of organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) using a cheap, newspaper-style "roll-to-roll" printing process.
These bendable materials could oust the conventional light bulb and revolutionize the way we illuminate our surroundings, being used for everything from lighting tiles and strips in homes and offices to windows that can simulate sunrise and sunset.
The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory Materials Testing Facility demonstrated, Oct.31, the one-thousandth successful firing of its Electromagnetic Railgun, reaching a materials testing milestone in the weapon's technological development and future implementation aboard U.S. Navy warships.
When investigating a murder, every clue helps. New research from North Carolina State University sheds light on how – and whether – blow flies survive when buried underground during their development. It's an advance that will help forensic investigators understand how long a body may have been left above ground before being buried – or possibly whether remains were moved from one grave to another.
Having radiologists shut down their workstations (and monitors) after an eight hour shift leads to substantial cost savings and energy reduction, according to a study in the November issue of the Journal of the American College of Radiology.
Radiology is at the forefront of technology use in medicine with the use of computers and scanning equipment.
Researchers have developed a tank-like robot that has the ability to scale smooth walls, opening up a series of applications ranging from inspecting pipes, buildings, aircraft and nuclear power plants to deployment in search and rescue operations.
Their study, published today, 1 November, in IOP Publishing's journal Smart Materials and Structures, is the first to apply this unique, bioinspired material to a robot that operates in a tank-like manner.
Boys do better on tests of technical aptitude (for example, mechanical aptitude tests) than girls. The same is true for adults. A new study published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, describes a theory explaining how the difference comes about: the root cause is that boys are just more interested in technical things, like taking apart a bike, than girls are.
Moore's Law, hardly a law but undeniably a persistent trend, says that every year and a half the number of transistors that fit on a chip roughly doubles. It's why electronics – from smart phones to flat screens, from MP4 players to movie cameras, from tablets to supercomputers – grow ever more varied, powerful, and compact, but also ever less expensive.