Why toast plasma when you can microwave it! Some believe the future of fusion in the U.S. lies in compact, spherical fusion vessels. A smaller tokamak, it is thought, could offer a more economical fusion option. The trick is squeezing everything into a small space. New research suggests eliminating one major component used to heat the plasma, freeing up much-needed space. Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), the private company Tokamak Energy and Kyushu University in Japan have proposed a design for a…
Not with these fatigue-detecting earbuds. UC Berkeley researchers have created earpieces that identify brain activity associated with relaxation and drowsiness. Everyone gets sleepy at work from time to time, especially after a big lunch. But for people whose jobs involve driving or working with heavy machinery, drowsiness can be extremely dangerous — if not outright deadly. Drowsy driving contributes to hundreds of fatal vehicle accidents in the U.S. each year, and the National Safety Council has cited drowsiness as a…
Recycling of Incineration Bottom Ash. Today, copper ore extraction is economically viable from a minimum content of 0.3 percent. Waste incineration produces ash with a fine fraction containing an average of 0.3 to 0.5 percent copper. However, its extraction is only worthwhile if the remaining mineral fraction can be utilized further. The University of Duisburg-Essen and partners from the waste incineration, processing, and cement industries developed a corresponding process in the EMSARZEM project. A practical test in an industrial format…
New technique from the CNSI at UCLA may lead to design approaches that optimize the performance of chemical reactions. The chemical and energy industries depend upon catalysts to drive the reactions used to create their products. Many important reactions use heterogeneous catalysts — meaning that the catalysts are in a different phase of matter than the substances they are reacting with, such as solid platinum reacting with gases in an automobile’s catalytic converter. Scientists have investigated the surface of well-defined…
The newly announced Ariel Data Challenge 2024, led by UCL researchers, is calling all data scientists, astronomers, and AI enthusiasts to help uncover the atmospheres of planets outside the solar system. The competition, based on the European Space Agency’s Ariel space mission and featured at the NeurIPS 2024 machine learning conference, will tackle one of astronomy’s most complex and important data analysis problems—extracting faint exoplanetary signals from noisy space telescope observations. It offers participants a unique chance to contribute to…
The Chiplet Center of Excellence commences operations. Three Fraunhofer Institutes have launched a forward-looking research initiative in Dresden: the Chiplet Center of Excellence (CCoE). Its purpose is to partner with industry to drive forward the introduction of chiplet technology. Researchers at the CCoE are working on several fronts for the automotive industry, developing the first workflows and methods for electronics design, demonstrator construction, and the evaluation of reliability. “Chiplets will play a critical role in the global semiconductor industry in…
International research team achieves advances in periodic oscillations and transportation for optical pulses, with potential for next-gen optical communications and signal processing. Full coherent control of wave transport and localization is a long-sought goal in wave physics research, which encompasses many different areas from solid-state to matter-wave physics and photonics. One among the most important and fascinating coherent transport effects is Bloch oscillation (BO), which refers to the periodic oscillatory motion of electrons in solids under a direct current (DC)-driving…
Researchers at the University of California, Davis have developed a rapid, noninvasive tool to track the neurons and biomolecules activated in the brain by psychedelic drugs. The protein-based tool, which is called Ca2+-activated Split-TurboID, or CaST, is described in research published in Nature Methods. There has been mounting interest in the value of psychedelic-inspired compounds as treatments for brain disorders including depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and substance use disorder. Psychedelic compounds like LSD, DMT and psilocybin promote the growth and strengthening of…
Research team at the University of Göttingen develops method for recognizing cell properties. Checking whether an avocado is hard or soft by looking at it? This would require recognizing how the plant cells behave behind the skin. The same applies to all other cells on our planet: Despite more than 100 years of intensive research, many of their properties remain hidden inside the cell. Researchers at the University of Göttingen describe in their recent publication in Nature Materials a new…
Researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems IPMS have significantly increased the transparency of OLED microdisplays. For the first time, a microdisplay of this kind will be presented at booth No. 38 at the “International Meeting on Information Display” (IMID) 2024 in Jeju, South Korea. Transparent electronics are already providing reliable services in some applications. For instance, they can be found as ultra-thin layers for touch displays or as transparent films with printed antennas for mobile communications. However, OLED…
Optimizing CAR-T Cells with CRISPR 2.0. As part of the German Research Foundation (DFG) Emmy Noether Program, Dr. Karl Petri is establishing a research group at the University Hospital Würzburg (UKW) to develop and enhance novel CRISPR 2.0 tools for generating and improving cancer-targeted CAR-T cell products. Würzburg. CAR-T cells are highly effective in treating selected blood cancers. However, challenges remain with this new therapy, which was first approved in 2017 in the USA and a year later in Europe…
Standard medical procedures are often time-consuming and generally do not take into account the individual characteristics of patients. This can have a negative impact on the success of treatment and impair quality of life. To solve this problem, a Fraunhofer research team from Fraunhofer IPMS, Fraunhofer IZI and Fraunhofer IOF is developing disposable biosensors that deliver rapid results and have extensive multiplexing capabilities. These biosensors enable the early detection of diseases and have the potential to significantly improve healthcare. On-Chip…
Why does the universe contain matter and (virtually) no antimatter? The BASE international research collaboration at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, headed by Professor Dr Stefan Ulmer from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU), has achieved an experimental breakthrough in this context. It can contribute to measuring the mass and magnetic moment of antiprotons more precisely than ever before – and thus identify possible matter-antimatter asymmetries. BASE has developed a trap, which can cool individual antiprotons much…
The origins of life remain a major mystery. How were complex molecules able to form and remain intact for prolonged periods without disintegrating? A team at ORIGINS, a Munich-based Cluster of Excellence, has demonstrated a mechanism that could have enabled the first RNA molecules to stabilize in the primordial soup. When two RNA strands combine, their stability and lifespan increase significantly. In all likelihood, life on Earth began in water, perhaps in a tide pool that was cut off from…
Researchers at Leibniz University Hannover send entangled photons and laser pulses of the same color over a single optical fiber for the first time. Four researchers from the Institute of Photonics at Leibniz University Hannover have developed a new transmitter-receiver concept for transmitting entangled photons over an optical fiber. This breakthrough could enable the next generation of telecommunications technology, the quantum Internet, to be routed via optical fibers. The quantum Internet promises eavesdropping-proof encryption methods that even future quantum computers…
Microscope reveals tiniest cell processes. Research team including Göttingen University develops high-resolution fluorescence microscope. What does the inside of a cell really look like? In the past, standard microscopes were limited in how well they could answer this question. Now, researchers from the Universities of Göttingen and Oxford, in collaboration with the University Medical Center Göttingen (UMG), have succeeded in developing a microscope with resolutions better than five nanometres (five billionths of a metre). This is roughly equivalent to the…
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