Controlling one-dimensional wormhole corrosion could help advance power plant designs. It started with a mystery: How did molten salt breach its metal container? Understanding the behavior of molten salt, a proposed coolant for next-generation nuclear reactors and fusion power, is a question of critical safety for advanced energy production. The multi-institutional research team, co-led by Penn State, initially imaged a cross-section of the sealed container, finding no clear pathway for the salt appearing on the outside. The researchers then used…
Although the Pony Express lasted only a short time in the mid-1800s before being outperformed by the transcontinental telegraph, it inspired a concept for a string of small satellites to transport data from Mars to Earth and help alleviate the data logjam currently occurring in the Deep Space Network. “The Solar System Pony Express is a mission concept that aims to augment the data transmission capabilities of the Deep Space Network using the idea of data mules,” said Robyn Woollands,…
– paving the way for future therapies for neurological disorders. Metabolite-induced in vivo fabrication of substrate-free organic bioelectronics. The boundaries between biology and technology are becoming blurred. Researchers at Linköping, Lund, and Gothenburg universities in Sweden have successfully grown electrodes in living tissue using the body’s molecules as triggers. The result, published in the journal Science, paves the way for the formation of fully integrated electronic circuits in living organisms. “For several decades, we have tried to create electronics that…
The untethered soft robot could one day help doctors perform surgery. A tiny robot that could one day help doctors perform surgery was inspired by the incredible gripping ability of geckos and the efficient locomotion of inchworms. The new robot, developed by engineers at the University of Waterloo, utilizes ultraviolet (UV) light and magnetic force to move on any surface, even up walls and across ceilings. It is the first soft robot of its kind that doesn’t require connection to…
The Sun emitted a strong solar flare, peaking at 3:16 p.m. ET on Feb. 17, 2023. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which watches the Sun constantly, captured an image of the event. Solar flares are powerful bursts of energy. Flares and solar eruptions can impact radio communications, electric power grids, navigation signals, and pose risks to spacecraft and astronauts. This flare is classified as an X2.2 flare. X-class denotes the most intense flares, while the number provides more information about its…
Sweat contains biomarkers that help doctors make health diagnoses. Wearable sensors can be used to monitor a person’s perspiration rate and provide information about the skin, nervous system activity and underlying health conditions. But not all sweat is created equal, and some cannot be measured with current sensors. A newly developed superhydrophobic biosensor could be used as a diagnostic tool to detect such types of sweat. The sensor, developed by Huanyu “Larry” Cheng, James L. Henderson, Jr. Memorial Associate Professor of Engineering…
Electro-photonic tweezer captures and detects trace amount of nanoplastics through surface-enhanced Raman scattering, Application in safe water resource management technology. Nanoplastics are plastics that have been discarded from our daily lives and that enter ecosystems in the size scale below 1 micro-metter after their physical and chemical disintegration. Recent research has shown that the concentration of microplastics in the major rivers in South Korea is the highest worldwide; it is not unusual to find news reports about the detection of…
Let’s say you needed to move an individual cell from one place to another. How would you do it? Maybe some special tweezers? A really tiny shovel? The fact is that manipulating individual cells is a difficult task. Some work has been done on so-called optical tweezers that can push cells around with beams of light, but while they are good at moving a single cell around, they are not intended for manipulating larger numbers of cells. New research conducted…
Astronomers from the University of Texas and the University of Arizona have discovered a rapidly growing black hole in one of the most extreme galaxies known in the very early Universe. The discovery of the galaxy and the black hole at its centre provides new clues on the formation of the very first supermassive black holes. The new work is published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Using observations taken with the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), a radio observatory…
Using electron microscopy to create ultrafast movies of nano-processes. A slow-motion movie on sports television channels shows processes in hundredths of a second. By contrast, processes on the nanoscale take place in the so-called femtosecond range: For example, an electron needs only billionths of a second to orbit a hydrogen atom. Physicists around the world are using special instruments to capture such ultrafast nano-processes in films. Researchers at Kiel University (CAU) have developed a new method for such films that…
Insights into supersonic phasons may improve accuracy of simulations. Warming a crystal of the mineral fresnoite, Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists discovered that excitations called phasons carried heat three times farther and faster than phonons, the excitations that usually carry heat through a material. “Neutrons were ideal for exploring these sources of heat transport because they interact with both phasons and phonons,” said Michael Manley, who led the study with Raphael Hermann. In most crystals, atomic vibrations propagate excited waves through the…
Scientists at Open Targets, EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), and GSK are revealing the shared basis of diseases using a map of interacting human proteins. By helping to understand how biological processes affect human traits and diseases, this work will prioritise new targets for drug discovery and identify drug repurposing opportunities. Proteins are molecules that do most of the work in our cells and are made following blueprints encoded in genes. They are essential for the structure, function, and regulation…
Study on mice shows male-specific effects on health. Insulin is not only a regulator of blood sugar, but also has an influence on life expectancy. If the insulin signalling pathway is inhibited, animals live longer. But which tissue is crucial for this? And do males and females react in the same way? Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing in Cologne have specifically lowered insulin pathway levels in different tissues of male and female mice. Their study…
When one travels through rough terrain, maps come in handy. They also help researchers to study the complex organization of the brain. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence have created a new set of maps for the zebrafish brain. They determined the activity of hundreds of genes with single-cell resolution and assembled the maps into an interactive atlas. The online resource supports researchers in finding their way around the brain of this vertebrate and provides new insights…
Molybdenum disulfide MoS2 is a groundbreaking material for electronics applications. As a two-dimensional layer similar to graphene, it is an excellent semiconductor, and can even become intrinsically superconducting under the right conditions. It’s not particularly surprising that science fiction authors have already been speculating about „molycircs“, fictional computer circuits built from MoS2, for years – and that physicists and engineers are directing huge research efforts at this material. At University of Regensburg, we have many years of expertise with diverse…
A research group led by Stefanie Komossa (MPIfR Bonn, Germany) presents new results on the galaxy OJ 287, based on the most dense and longest radio-to-high-energy observations to date with telescopes like the Effelsberg telescope and the Swift Observatory. The results favor a pair of black holes in the center of the galaxy with a smaller mass of 100 million solar masses for the primary black hole. Several outstanding mysteries, including the apparent absence of the latest big outburst of…
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