Sometimes an image gives those who can read it correctly a deeper insight into what they can see. In many scientific disciplines, the key to extracting meaningful information from large three-dimensional images, obtained from X-ray tomography or optical microscopy, is segmentation, a tedious and time-consuming task if done manually. An interdisciplinary team of researchers from the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS), Heidelberg University, the KIT and the Technical University of Darmstadt now present Biomedisa, an easy-to-use open-source online platform…
Researchers investigate combination of carbon ion and immunotherapy It is still a glance into the future: The combination of carbon ion and immune therapy could become an effective tool in the fight against cancer. Promising results for the potential benefit of this treatment combination have now been published. The authors are an international team of researchers, led by the Department of Biophysics at the GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung in Darmstadt, and including the Parthenope University of Naples and the Japanese…
Accelerating the additive production of metal components by at least a factor of 10: With this goal in mind, the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft launched the lighthouse project “futureAM – Next Generation Additive Manufacturing” in 2017. As the project ends in November 2020, six Fraunhofer institutes have made technological leaps forward in systems engineering, materials and process control as well as end-to-end digitalization, thus increasing the performance and cost-effectiveness of metal-based additive manufacturing along the entire process chain. On the one hand, the…
At high concentrations, reactive oxygen species – known as oxidants – are harmful to cells in all organisms and have been linked to ageing. But a study from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, has now shown that low levels of the oxidant hydrogen peroxide can stimulate an enzyme that helps slow down the ageing of yeast cells. One benefit of antioxidants, such as vitamins C and E, is that they neutralise reactive oxygen species – known as oxidants – which…
Germanium telluride (GeTe) is known as a ferrolectric Rashba semiconductor with a number of interesting properties. The crystals consist of nanodomains, whose ferrolectric polarization can be switched by external electric fields. Because of the so-called Rashba effect, this ferroelectricity can also be used to switch electron spins within each domain. Germanium telluride is therefore an interesting material for spintronic devices, which allow data processing with significantly less energy input. Now a team from HZB and the Lomonosov Moscow State University,…
Scientists have found a way to generate electricity from nylon, raising hopes that the clothes on our backs will become an important source of energy. Researchers have found a way to produce nylon fibres that are smart enough to produce electricity from simple body movement, paving the way for smart clothes that will monitor our health through miniaturised sensors and charge our devices without any external power source. This discovery – a collaboration between the University of Bath, the Max…
In 1973, physicist and later Nobel laureate Philip W. Anderson proposed a bizarre state of matter: the quantum spin liquid (QSL). Unlike the everyday liquids we know, the QSL actually has to do with magnetism – and magnetism has to do with spin. Disordered electron spin produces QSLs What makes a magnet? It was a long-lasting mystery, but today we finally know that magnetism arises from a peculiar property of sub-atomic particles, like electrons. That property is called “spin”, and…
Chemists at the Leibniz Institute for Catalysis in Rostock discovered the molecular mechanism of a photocatalyst that completely breaks down organic contaminants in wastewater with the help of sunlight. Worldwide, for example, more and more residues of drugs such as anti-inflammatory drugs, antibiotics or contraceptives are entering treatment systems where they are difficult to remove. Laboratories are increasingly working on photocatalytic solutions, but knowledge of the active principles is incomplete. Researchers around Angelika Brückner and Jabor Rabeah at LIKAT have…
To ensure that sepsis patients receive appropriate antibiotics as quickly as possible, Fraunhofer IGB researchers have developed a diagnostic procedure that uses high-throughput sequencing of blood samples and delivers results much faster than conventional culture-based techniques. Thanks to the latest single-molecule sequencing techniques, this process has now been further improved so that pathogens can be identified after just a few hours. The basic methodology is currently being tested in a multi-center study with several hundred patients. Sepsis – also known…
For quality control and damage assessment of injection-moulded components, simple and cost-effective tests are desired. Preparation of the standard test specimens is sometimes costly. In this case, the specimens taken from the flat areas of the component can be preferred. Scientists at the Fraunhofer LBF have improved known in-plane geometry for the shear test. Together with the modified loading schema, the new procedure is reliable and can be used for a wide range of materials. The new test specification is…
It appears that autophagy protects our neurons in the brain, but evidently for entirely different reasons than previously assumed, as researchers from the Leibniz-Forschungsinstitut für Molekulare Pharmakologie (FMP) and Charité in Berlin have now shown. When the scientists used a genetic trick to switch off autophagy-mediated “cellular waste disposal”, instead of detecting protein deposits, as expected, they found elevated levels of the endoplasmic reticulum, a system composed of membrane sacs which acts, among other functions, as a calcium store. This…
A new method shows that it’s now possible to estimate the volume of magma stored below volcanoes providing essential information about the potential size of future eruptions. Most active volcanoes on Earth are dormant, meaning that they have not erupted for hundreds or even thousands of years, and are normally not considered hazardous by the local population. A team of volcanologists from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), working in collaboration with the University of Heidelberg in Germany, has devised a…
EPFL engineers have developed a computer chip that combines two functions – logic operations and data storage – into a single architecture, paving the way to more efficient devices. It’s a major breakthrough in the field of electronics. Engineers at EPFL’s Laboratory of Nanoscale Electronics and Structures (LANES) have developed a next-generation circuit that allows for smaller, faster and more energy-efficient devices – which would have major benefits for artificial-intelligence systems. Their revolutionary technology is the first to use a…
Even if a black hole can be described with a mathematical model, it doesn’t mean it exists in reality. Some theoretical models are unstable: though they can be used to run mathematical calculations, from the point of view of physics they make no sense. A physicist from RUDN University developed an approach to finding such instability regions. The work was published in the Physics of the Dark Universe journal. The existence of black holes was first predicted by Einstein’s general…
Know when to unfold ’em ‘Unfolding’ techniques used to improve the accuracy of particle detector data can also improve the readout of quantum states from a quantum computer. Borrowing a page from high-energy physics and astronomy textbooks, a team of physicists and computer scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has successfully adapted and applied a common error-reduction technique to the field of quantum computing. In the world of subatomic particles and giant particle…
Mapping the magnetic field for Fermilab’s Muon g-2 experiment As scientists await the highly anticipated initial results of the Muon g-2 experiment at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, collaborating scientists from DOE‘s Argonne National Laboratory continue to employ and maintain the unique system that maps the magnetic field in the experiment with unprecedented precision. Argonne scientists upgraded the measurement system, which uses an advanced communication scheme and new magnetic field probes and electronics to map the field throughout…
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