Tech
Field-effect transistors are key components of sensors, electrical circuits, or data storage devices. The transistors used to date have been mainly based on inorganic semiconductors such as silicon. More recently, organic materials have emerged, with semiconducting properties that have allowed the fabrication of organic field-effect transistors (OFETs). The use of organic components as the device active layer brings promising features such as easy processing and low cost.
Computer scientists at Saarland University show how these special textiles can be produced in a comparatively easy way, thus opening up new use cases.
One potential cause of cancer is circadian disruption, the misalignment of environmental cues (light, food intake, etc.) and our endogenous circadian rhythms. It is established that regular physical activity throughout lifetime can reduce cancer risk. This protective effect could be the most beneficial when physical activity is done in the morning -this is the main result of a recent study coordinated by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), a centre supported by the "la Caixa Foundation", together with the Department of Epidemiology at the Medical University of Vienna.
Mental accounting is a concept that describes the mental processes we employ to organise our resource use. Human beings tend to create separate mental budget compartments where specific acts of consumption and payments are linked. This mechanism can be counter-productive when it comes to energy consumption and can have a negative impact on attempts to reduce carbon emissions.
A team of physicists led by Professor Patrick Windpassinger at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) has successfully transported light stored in a quantum memory over a distance of 1.2 millimeters. They have demonstrated that the controlled transport process and its dynamics has only little impact on the properties of the stored light. The researchers used ultra-cold rubidium-87 atoms as a storage medium for the light as to achieve a high level of storage efficiency and a long lifetime.
The European Green Deal aims to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the electricity sector, which could have substantial economic and social impacts across Central European regions. Some regions might benefit more than others from new employment opportunities and from reduced air pollution, while others face threats to employment from phasing out coal and nuclear power plants. Such a transition to renewable electricity thus risks creating new regional winners and losers.
Cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins may reduce cancer risk in humans through a pathway unrelated to cholesterol, says a study published today in eLife.
Statins reduce levels of LDL-cholesterol, the so-called 'bad' cholesterol, by inhibiting an enzyme called HMG-CoA-reductase (HMGCR). Clinical trials have previously demonstrated convincing evidence that statins reduce the risk of heart attacks and other cardiovascular diseases. But evidence for the potential effect of statins to reduce the risk of cancer is less clear.
ORLANDO, Oct. 13, 2020 - In the era of electric cars, machine learning and ultra-efficient vehicles for space travel, computers and hardware are operating faster and more efficiently. But this increase in power comes with a trade-off: They get superhot.
To counter this, University of Central Florida researchers are developing a way for large machines to "breathe" in and out cooling blasts of water to keep their systems from overheating.
The findings are detailed in a recent study in the journal Physical Review Fluids.
Combining genetic and experimental data into models about the influenza virus can help predict more accurately which strains will be most common during the next winter, says a study published recently in eLife.
The models could make the design of flu vaccines more accurate, providing fuller protection against a virus that causes around half a million deaths each year globally.
Researchers from MIPT have developed a prototype detector of solar particles. The device is capable of picking up protons at kinetic energies between 10 and 100 megaelectronvolts, and electrons at 1-10 MeV. This covers most of the high-energy particle flux coming from the sun. The new detector can improve radiation protection for astronauts and spaceships, as well as advancing our understanding of solar flares. The research findings are reported in the Journal of Instrumentation.
The North American monsoon has dictated the length of wildfire season for centuries in the U.S.-Mexico border region, according to new University of Arizona research that can inform land management amid global climate change.
By comparing two magnitude measurements for seismic events recorded locally, researchers can tell whether the event was a small earthquake or a single-fire buried chemical explosion.
The findings, published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, give seismologists one more tool to monitor nuclear explosions, particularly low-yield explosions that are detected using seismic stations that are 150 kilometers (about 93 miles) or less from the explosion site.
Intelligent cameras could be one step closer thanks to a research collaboration between the Universities of Bristol and Manchester who have developed cameras that can learn and understand what they are seeing.
Roboticists and artificial intelligence (AI) researchers know there is a problem in how current systems sense and process the world. Currently they are still combining sensors, like digital cameras that are designed for recording images, with computing devices like graphics processing units (GPUs) designed to accelerate graphics for video games.
CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Sequencing RNA from individual cells can reveal a great deal of information about what those cells are doing in the body. MIT researchers have now greatly boosted the amount of information gleaned from each of those cells, by modifying the commonly used Seq-Well technique.
Optical spectrometers are instruments with a wide variety of uses. By measuring the intensity of light across different wavelengths, they can be used to image tissues or measure the chemical composition of everything from a distant galaxy to a leaf. Now researchers at the UC Davis Department of Biomedical Engineering have come up a with a new, rapid method for characterizing and calibrating spectrometers, based on how they respond to "noise."
Rendering of prism and spectrum