New weapons against antibiotic resistance … In the arms race “mankind against bacteria”, bacteria are currently ahead of us. Our former miracle weapons, antibiotics, are failing more and more frequently when germs use tricky maneuvers to protect themselves from the effects of these drugs. Some species even retreat into the inside of human cells, where they remain “invisible” to the immune system. These particularly dreaded pathogens include multi-resistant staphylococci (MRSA), which can cause life-threatening diseases such as sepsis or pneumonia….
Careful criminals usually clean a scene, wiping away visible blood and fingerprints. However, prints made with trace amounts of blood, invisible to the naked eye, could remain. Dyes can detect these hidden prints, but the dyes don’t work well on certain surfaces. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces have developed a fluorescent polymer that binds to blood in a fingerprint — without damaging any DNA also on the surface — to create high-contrast images. Fingerprints are critical…
Scientists have found fragments of titanium blasting out of a famous supernova. This discovery, made with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, could be a major step in pinpointing exactly how some giant stars explode. This work is based on Chandra observations of the remains of a supernova called Cassiopeia A (Cas A), located in our galaxy about 11,000 light-years from Earth. This is one of the youngest known supernova remnants, with an age of about 350 years. For years, scientists have…
Certain signalling proteins, which are responsible for the development of innate immune function in almost all animals are also required for the formation of the dorsal-ventral (back-belly) axis in insect embryos. A new study by researchers from the University of Cologne’s Institute of Zoology suggests that the relevance of these signalling proteins for insect axis formation has increased independently several times during evolution. For example, the research team found similar evolutionary patterns in the Mediterranean field cricket as in the…
Researchers at Osaka University and JOANNEUM RESEARCH develop ultrathin self-powered e-health patches that can monitor a user’s pulse and blood pressure, which may lead to new flexible motion-based energy harvesting devices. Scientists at Osaka University, in cooperation with JOANNEUM RESEARCH (Weiz, Austria), introduced wireless health monitoring patches that use embedded piezoelectric nanogenerators to power themselves with harvested biomechanical energy. This work may lead to new autonomous health sensors as well as battery-less wearable electronic devices. As wearable technology and smart…
Researchers at MUSC use AI software to predict coronary artery plaque composition and significance without the risks of invasive procedures. Coronary artery disease (CAD) is the most common form of heart disease and is present in about 18.2 million American adults. This disease is defined by narrowing of the vessels that supply the heart with critical oxygen and nutrients, typically caused by plaque blockages and inflammation. But not all plaques have the same composition, and while blockages in the heart…
A revolutionary technique gives scientists an unparalleled close-up view inside fleeting particles called excitons. In a world-first, researchers from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) have captured an image showing the internal orbits, or spatial distribution, of particles in an exciton – a goal that had eluded scientists for almost a century. Excitons are excited states of matter found within semiconductors – a class of materials that are key to many modern technological devices, such as…
Artificial Intelligence tools enable researchers to ‘shake hands’ with ancient scribes. The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered some seventy years ago, are famous for containing the oldest manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and many hitherto unknown ancient Jewish texts. But the individual people behind the scrolls have eluded scientists, because the scribes are anonymous. Now, by combining the sciences and the humanities, University of Groningen researchers have cracked the code, which enables them to discover the scribes behind the…
Astronomers have discovered a pulsar – a dense and rapidly spinning neutron star sending radio waves into the cosmos–using a low-frequency radio telescope in outback Australia. The pulsar was detected with the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope, in Western Australia’s remote Mid West region. It’s the first time scientists have discovered a pulsar with the MWA but they believe it will be the first of many. The finding is a sign of things to come from the multi-billion-dollar Square Kilometre…
Battery electrodes, storage devices for gases, and some catalyst materials have tiny functional pores that can accommodate atoms, ions, and molecules. Most battery materials, novel catalysts, and storage materials for hydrogen have one thing in common: they have a structure comprised of tiny pores in the nanometer range. These pores provide space which can be occupied by guest atoms, ions, and molecules. As a consequence, the properties of the guest and the host can change dramatically. Understanding the processes inside…
Making the speed of electronic technology as fast as possible is a central aim of contemporary materials research. The key components of fast computing technologies are transistors: switching devices that turn electrical currents on and off very quickly as basic steps of logic operations. In order to improve our knowledge about ideal transistor materials, physicists are constantly trying to determine new methods to accomplish such extremely fast switches. Researchers from the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society in…
Modern medicine needs better quality samples than traditional biopsy needles can provide, ultrasonically oscillating needles can improve treatment and reduce discomfort. The diagnosis of diseases like cancer almost always needs a biopsy – a procedure where a clinician removes a piece of suspect tissue from the body to examine it, typically under a microscope. Many areas of diagnostic medicine, especially cancer management, have seen huge advances in technology, with genetic sequencing, molecular biology and artificial intelligence all rapidly increasing doctors’…
University at Buffalo tech can identify machines by their unique ‘hot end,’ could aid intellectual property, security. 3D printing is transforming everything from fashion and health care to transportation and toys. But this rapidly evolving technology, also known as additive manufacturing, can threaten national security and intellectual property rights. To reduce illicit use of 3D printers, Zhanpeng Jin, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University at Buffalo, is developing a way to track…
Here’s why that matters. Climate change is driving some fish into cooler, deeper waters. Now they may be faced with another challenge: how to make sense of a world drained of color. When marine biologist Eleanor Caves of the University of Exeter thinks back to her first scuba dives, one of the first things she recalls noticing is that colors seem off underwater. The vivid reds, oranges, purples and yellows she was used to seeing in the sunlit waters near…
Super-massive black holes are found at the centers of many galaxies. But all efforts to detect them directly suffer from the fact that no information from their interior can reach us directly. Now, Professor Anton Zensus, director at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn and founding chairman of the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration (EHT), has proposed an independent method to filter out those explanations from the existing ones that are viable. At the same time, this method…
Discovery a ‘coup’ in astrophysics involving observations with nine instruments. A team of astronomers including Carnegie’s Alycia Weinberger and former-Carnegie postdoc Meredith MacGregor, now an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, spotted an extreme outburst, or flare, from the Sun’s nearest neighbor–the star Proxima Centauri. Their work, which could help guide the search for life beyond our Solar System, is published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Proxima Centauri is a “red dwarf” with about one-eighth the mass of…
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