Physicists at The Australian National University (ANU) have developed tiny translucent slides capable of producing two very different images by manipulating the direction in which light travels through them. As light passes through the slide, an image of Australia can be seen, but when you flip the slide and look again, an image of the Sydney Opera House is visible. The pair of images created is just one example of an untapped number of possibilities. The ability to produce two…
Giant arsenals of unexploded ordinance are sitting on the ocean floor, lost in battle or dumped as waste. The risky job of detecting these underwater hazards is currently given to submarines specially fitted for the purpose. But even they cannot get to some of the tighter or harder to reach spots, forcing expert divers to go down and take over the often life-threatening work. A German research consortium including Fraunhofer IZM is now using a submarine robot that is as…
Advance shows promise for “meta-bots” designed to deliver drugs or aid rescue missions. A team of UCLA engineers and their colleagues have developed a new design strategy and 3D printing technique to build robots in one single step. A study that outlined the advance, along with the construction and demonstration of an assortment of tiny robots that walk, maneuver and jump, was published in Science. The breakthrough enabled the entire mechanical and electronic systems needed to operate a robot to…
… that has 100 times more light durability than conventional products. Osaka Metropolitan University scientists synthesize new photostable organic semiconductor. Due to their high hole mobility, pentacene and its derivatives have been the representative organic semiconductors and have been the subject of much research, both basic and applied. In particular, they are expected to be applied to semiconductor devices such as field-effect transistors. In addition, organic semiconductors have the advantage of being inexpensive to produce by inkjet printing and having…
Researchers at Ruhr-Universität Bochum have been studying the role of the two proteins tenascin C and tenascin R in multiple sclerosis. In this disease, cells of the immune system destroy the myelin sheaths, i.e. the sheaths of the nerve cells. As the Bochum team showed in experiments with mice, the regeneration of the myelin sheaths is inhibited if the two tenascins are present. Dr. Juliane Bauch and Professor Andreas Faissner from the Cell Morphology and Molecular Neurobiology Department in Bochum…
Study on wound healing after heart attack published in Science. More than 300,000 people suffer a heart attack in Germany every year. In this case, the heart muscle is no longer supplied with sufficient blood and oxygen, and part of the heart muscle tissue dies and becomes scarred. The consequences can range from massive cardiac insufficiency to heart failure. Unlike the liver, the heart of an adult human being can hardly regenerate. However, it is able to initiate repair processes….
Material scientists at Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany have developed a mechanoluminescent material that can not only be used to generate a local heat input by means of ultrasound, but also provides feedback on the local temperature at the same time. If mechanoluminescent materials are subjected to external mechanical stress, they emit visible or invisible light. Such excitation can occur due to bending or gentle pressure, for example, but also completely contact-free through ultrasound. In this way, the effect can…
New cooperation of GSI/FAIR, Technische Hochschule Mittelhessen and Varian. It is an important step to extend future treatment methods in the fight against cancer: The GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung, the Technische Hochschule Mittelhessen (THM) and Varian, a Siemens Healthineers company from Palo Alto, California, intend to jointly advance medical-technical developments in the field of FLASH therapy and further pave the way to clinical application. To this purpose, an agreement was concluded among the three collaborators. The collaboration aims to allow…
… offer potential to improve delivery of drugs into the eyeball. Published research on new eye treatment delivery shows improvement over hypodermic needles. A collaborative team, including scientists from the Terasaki Institute for Biomedical Innovation (TIBI), has developed a novel, self-plugging microneedle for injecting therapeutics into the eyes, potentially solving one of the major challenges of treating eye diseases – accurate delivery of therapeutic drugs to the retina, while guarding against possible complications at the injection site. Recently published in…
The molecule is unusual and has ‘great potential’ in catalysis, conduction and other applications. Scientists at Kyoto University’s Institute for Cell-Material Sciences have discovered a novel cluster compound that could prove useful as a catalyst. Compounds, called polyoxometalates, contain a large metal-oxide cluster carry a negative charge. They are found everywhere, from anti-viral medicines to rechargeable batteries and flash memory devices. The new cluster compound is a hydroxy-iodide (HSbOI) and is unusual, as it has large, positively charged clusters. Only…
Imagine a road with two lanes in each direction. One lane is for slow cars, and the other is for fast ones. For electrons moving along a quantum wire, researchers in Cambridge and Frankfurt have discovered that there are also two ‘lanes’, but electrons can take both at the same time! Current in a wire is carried by the flow of electrons. When the wire is very narrow (one-dimensional, 1D) then electrons cannot overtake each other, as they strongly repel…
A researcher at the University of Tsukuba develops a method for creating optically active polymers using a helical liquid crystal template, which may allow for future computer and TV displays to operate based on circularly polarized light. A scientist from the Faculty of Pure and Applied Sciences at the University of Tsukuba developed a method for producing electrically conductive polymers that assume a helical configuration. By using a liquid crystal as a template, he was able to produce optically active…
Heidelberg plant researchers identify key protein in a mechanism that controls the life of proteins. Proteins are existential building blocks of life that also have numerous functions in plants. An average plant cell contains more than 20 billion protein molecules that maintain cellular metabolism and stabilise their structure. Researchers at the Centre for Organismal Studies of Heidelberg University recently shed light on a cellular mechanism that extends the life of plant proteins. They have now identified a key protein that…
– a promising discovery. A team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces (MPICI) and McGill University in Canada discovered strong adhesive properties of white-berry mistletoe. The mistletoe berry’s flexible fibers adhere to both skin and cartilage as well as to various synthetic materials and could find application in many fields, such as wound sealant in biomedicine, through ease of processing. For their research, the materials scientists led by Prof. Dr. Peter Fratzl picked the mistletoe…
To develop new drugs and vaccines, detailed knowledge about nature’s smallest biological building blocks – the biomolecules – is required. Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, are now presenting a groundbreaking microscopy technique that allows proteins, DNA and other tiny biological particles to be studied in their natural state in a completely new way. A great deal of time and money is required when developing medicines and vaccines. It is therefore crucial to be able to streamline the work…
Scientists have identified the biochemical signals that control the emergence of the body pattern in the primate embryo. This will guide work to understand birth defects and pregnancy loss in humans. The study also provides a crucial reference for foetal tissue generation in the lab – such tissue is in short supply but is needed for drug screening and studies into stem cell-based treatments to regenerate body tissues in diseases like Parkinson’s, for example. Embryos develop from a clump of…
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