Droplet manipulation has important applications in areas such as heat management, water harvesting, and chemical reactions. A research team from City University of Hong Kong (CityU) developed a multi-functional electrostatic droplet tweezer that can precisely “trap” liquid droplets and remotely guide their motion on flat and tilted surfaces, and in oil mediums. Experiments showed that the tweezer can manipulate droplets of different volumes and with different components. It has potential applications in areas such as high-throughput biological and chemical analysis. The…
Learning from the single cell: How is the activity of genes regulated by the packaging of DNA? To answer this question, a technique to measure both gene expression and DNA packaging at the same time was developed by Franka Rang and Kim de Luca, researchers from the group of Jop Kind (group leader at the Hubrecht Institute and Oncode Investigator). This method, EpiDamID, determines the location of modified proteins around which the DNA is wrapped. It is important to gather…
A new technique could enable a robot to manipulate squishy objects like pizza dough or soft materials like clothing. Imagine a pizza maker working with a ball of dough. She might use a spatula to lift the dough onto a cutting board then use a rolling pin to flatten it into a circle. Easy, right? Not if this pizza maker is a robot. For a robot, working with a deformable object like dough is tricky because the shape of dough…
Just like flash floods, flash droughts come on fast — drying out soil in a matter of days to weeks. These events can wipe out crops and cause huge economic losses. And according to scientists, the speed at which they dry out the landscape has increased. Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Texas Tech University found that although the number of flash droughts has remained stable during the past two decades, more…
Even in our cosmic backyard, the Solar System, many questions remain open. On Venus there are formations similar to volcanoes, but it is not known if they are active. The surface of Mars suggests that there was once a vast ocean, but how it disappeared remains unclear. On the other hand, recent detections of chemical compounds that may indicate the presence of biological activity on Mars and Venus, the so-called biosignatures, keep the search for life outside Earth alive. The…
To test if a single gene could affect an entire ecosystem, a research team of the University of Zurich conducted a lab experiment with a plant and its associated ecosystem of insects. They found that plants with a mutation at a specific gene foster ecosystems with more insect species. The discovery of such a “keystone gene” could change current biodiversity conservation strategies. More than 50 years ago on the shoreline of a rocky tide pool, the US ecologist Robert Paine…
… by ground-based very-low-frequency (VLF) transmitters. Narrow-band VLF transmitter waves originate from the powerful ground-based VLF transmitters for submarine communications, which are typically over the frequency range of 10–30 kHz. VLF transmitter signals, being guided by the gradients of the Earth’s magnetic field, can leak a portion of the wave power into the magnetosphere. Early theoretical studies suggested that VLF transmitter waves potentially play an important role in electron precipitations in the near-Earth space. With the availability of high-resolution wave…
Was there life on Mars? This is the question that the European Space Agency (ESA) is setting out to answer with its ExoMars mission. The mission, in which Russia is a participant, is scheduled to launch this fall, although recent political developments have raised questions as to whether this will be possible. Part of the mission is an analytical system that was designed to operate in space and was created as part of the research work conducted at the Fraunhofer…
Cichlids and stingrays can perform simple addition and subtraction in the number range of one to five. This has been shown in a recent study by the University of Bonn, which has now been published in the journal Scientific Reports. It is not known what the animals need their mathematical abilities for. Suppose there are some coins on the table in front of you. If the number is small, you can tell right away exactly how many there are. You…
Artificial intelligence is regularly applied in areas such as image analysis and speech recognition. However, in the industrial production sector its potential is still scarcely used. Several Fraunhofer institutes have recently developed a solution as part of the lighthouse project “ML4P — Machine Learning for Production”, which aims to make industrial manufacturing much more efficient through the use of machine learning. The software suite is very flexible and can be easily applied in existing production processes. The production industry is…
Scientists are looking for a connection between bacterial genes and disease severity. The bacterium Escherichia coli is found in the human intestine, and elsewhere. There it is harmless, but in certain conditions it can become a pathogen. It can cause bladder infections or even sepsis. A team of researchers led by RESIST professor Marco Galardini at TWINCORE, together with colleagues from the medical faculty of the University of Paris, has now investigated whether certain genes of the bacterium are associated…
Scientists identify a pathway of immune cell inhibition that may provide the basis for novel approaches to immunotherapy of colon cancer. Their results also highlight important roles of the intestinal microbiota in the development of the disease. Colon cancer is one of the most common types of cancer. Particularly in advanced stages of disease, the treatment still largely relies on traditional chemotherapy. The new generation of cancer treatments, so-called immunotherapies, has only been effective in a small subgroup of colon…
Scientists have published the first complete, gapless sequence of a human genome, two decades after the Human Genome Project produced the first draft human genome sequence. According to researchers, having a complete, gap-free sequence of the roughly 3 billion bases (or “letters”) in our DNA is critical for understanding the full spectrum of human genomic variation and for understanding the genetic contributions to certain diseases. The work was done by the Telomere to Telomere (T2T) consortium, which included leadership from researchers…
Less waste from lower enriched Uranium targets: Nuclear medicine utilizes technetium-99m among other things for tumor diagnostics. With over 30 million applications worldwide each year, it is the most widely used radioisotope. The precursor material, molybdenum-99, is mainly produced in research reactors. A study at the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Research Neutron Source (FRM II) at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) now illustrates options to significantly reduce the radioactive waste produced during processing to a medical product. Over 85 percent of…
Harnessing the properties of materials so that technology can continue to move forward means getting to grips with increasingly more challenging systems. A team led by a researcher from Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo has turned its focus to chiral molecular and colloidal crystals, revealing the role of emergent elastic fields in their behavior. Their findings are published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It is easy for most people to picture the properties of…
A Texas A&M team’s findings could have implications for the treatment of bone regeneration. Stem cells can develop into many different types of cells in the body. For instance, when a person is injured, stem cells come to the site of the injury and aid in healing damaged tissues. New nanotechnology developed by a team of researchers from Texas A&M University could leverage the body’s regenerative potential by directing stem cells to form bone tissue. Akhilesh K. Gaharwar, associate professor and Presidential Impact…
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