A study of nearly 500,000 people has shown that smoking shortens the end fragments of chromosomes in the white blood cells of our immune systems. The length of these end fragments, called telomeres, is an indicator of how quickly we age and our cells’ ability to repair and regenerate. In her presentation to the European Respiratory Society International Congress in Milan, Italy [1], Dr Siyu Dai, who is an assistant professor in the School of Clinical Medicine, Hangzhou Normal University,…
Researchers in Germany and Japan have been able to increase the diffusion of magnetic whirls, so called skyrmions, by a factor of ten. In today’s world, our lives are unimaginable without computers. Up until now, these devices process information using primarily electrons as charge carriers, with the components themselves heating up significantly in the process. Active cooling is thus necessary, which comes with high energy costs. Spintronics aims to solve this problem: Instead of utilizing the electron flow for information…
… toward Totten Ice Shelf in Southeast Antarctica. An international team of scientists has successfully conducted large-scale helicopter-based observations along the coast of East Antarctica and has identified pathways through which warm ocean water flows from the open ocean into ice shelf cavities for the first time. During six days of observations, the team was able to retrieve temperature and other data at 67 sites covering the entire continental shelf region off the Totten Ice Shelf, the floating portion of…
Miniature robots to carry out research below the ice. The DLR project line TRIPLE enters its second phase / Joint Project TRIPLE-nanoAUV 2 coordinated by MARUM. The project line TRIPLE, funded by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, is entering its second funding phase. In the research project TRIPLE-nanoAUV 2, which is headquartered at MARUM – Center for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen, a miniature autonomous vehicle is being developed for sub-ice technology missions….
World-class technology technology for a 2-liter class hydrogen engine (or a passenger car hydrogen engine) capable of running entirely on hydrogen has been developed for the first time in the country. Emissions of carbon dioxide and fine dust reduced by 99% and 90%, respectively. Amid the fierce competition throughout the globe to develop hydrogen mobility technologies to achieve carbon neutrality, a new technology for a 2-liter class hydrogen-fueled engine (a passenger car hydrogen engine) capable of running entirely on hydrogen…
Newly discovered reaction mechanism overcomes rapid performance decline in lithium-sulfur batteries. Scientists discover surprising pathway to better lithium-sulfur batteries by visualizing reactions at the atomic scale. The road from breakthrough in the lab to practical technology can be a long and bumpy one. The lithium-sulfur battery is an example. It has notable advantages over current lithium-ion batteries powering vehicles. But it has yet to dent the market despite intense development over many years. That situation could change in the future thanks to…
Oregon State University research has uncovered a possible clue as to why glaciers that terminate at the sea are retreating at unprecedented rates: the bursting of tiny, pressurized bubbles in underwater ice. Published today in Nature Geoscience, the study shows that glacier ice, characterized by pockets of pressurized air, melts much more quickly than the bubble-free sea ice or manufactured ice typically used to research melt rates at the ocean-ice interface of tidewater glaciers. Tidewater glaciers are rapidly retreating, the…
A team of researchers, engineers and technicians has developed a ‘SMART box’ to power the world’s largest radio telescope. The Power and Signal Distribution (PaSD) SMART boxes (Small Modular Aggregation RFoF Trunk) are an essential component of the Square Kilometre Array Low frequency (SKA-Low) telescope, currently under construction at Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara, the CSIRO Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory, in Western Australia. The SMART boxes provide electrical power to the SKA-Low telescope’s 131,072 antennas and collect signals received from the sky to…
New optical system designed to target and control individual atoms. Using laser light, researchers have developed the most robust method currently known to control individual qubits made of the chemical element barium. The ability to reliably control a qubit is an important achievement for realizing future functional quantum computers. This new method, developed at the University of Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC), uses a small glass waveguide to separate laser beams and focus them four microns apart, about four-hundredths…
Researchers who created a soft robot that could navigate simple mazes without human or computer direction have now built on that work, creating a “brainless” soft robot that can navigate more complex and dynamic environments. “In our earlier work, we demonstrated that our soft robot was able to twist and turn its way through a very simple obstacle course,” says Jie Yin, co-corresponding author of a paper on the work and an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at…
There’s a rhythm to developing life. Growing from a tiny cell cluster into an adult organism takes precise timing and control. The right genes must turn on at the right time, for the right duration, and in the correct order. Losing the rhythm can lead to diseases like cancer. So, what keeps every gene on beat? Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) Professor Christopher Hammell has found that in the worm C. elegans, this genetic orchestra has no single conductor. Instead, a quartet of…
In a new interdisciplinary project between BTU Cottbus and TU Dresden, researchers are investigating the use of novel enzymes to remove micropollutants from municipal wastewater. Medicines are good for our bodies. However, depending on the type of drug, up to 90 percent of the active ingredient is excreted unchanged and thus ends up in wastewater. Improper disposal of pharmaceutical products in toilets and washbasins also leads to residues that can only be partially intercepted in wastewater treatment plants. The remaining…
… in the USA successfully concluded. For the first time, German researchers have measured the influence of clouds on short-term fluctuations of solar radiation in North America. They have used a globally unique network of radiation sensors that was designed and built at the Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research (TROPOS), which has been deployed in the flat prairies of the Midwest of the USA from the beginning of June until the end of August this year. So-called pyranometers have recorded…
The omnipresence of images on the internet on the one hand and the exponential learning curve of AI image generators on the other heighten the risk of image manipulations with malicious intent. CISPA researcher Zheng Li and his colleagues have tested a technique that can partially prevent this. The results of their research have been published in the paper “UnGANable: Defending Against GAN-based Face Manipulation” at the renowned “USENIX Security” conference. A significant feature of contemporary online communication is the…
Harnessing high-dimensional quantum states with QDs and OAM. Generation of nearly deterministic OAM-based entangled states offers a bridge between photonic technologies for quantum advancements. Quantum technology’s future rests on the exploitation of fascinating quantum mechanics concepts — such as high-dimensional quantum states. Think of these as states basic ingredients of quantum information science and quantum tech. To manipulate these states, scientists have turned to light, specifically a property called orbital angular momentum (OAM), which deals with how light twists and…
A vital component of the batteries at the heart of electric vehicles and grid energy storage, lithium is key to a clean energy future. But producing the silvery-white metal comes with significant environmental costs. Among them is the vast amount of land and time needed to extract lithium from briny water, with large operations running into the dozens of square miles and often requiring over a year to begin production. Now, researchers at Princeton have developed an extraction technique that…
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