The materials are called “topological insulators.” Unlike ordinary materials that are either insulators or conductors, topological insulators are in some sense…

The international technology group SCHOTT is involved in the Rosetta mission on exploring Comet Tschuri (67P/Tschurjumow-Gerasimenko). The company supplied…

Starburst galaxies typically result from the merger or close encounter of two separate galaxies. Previous research had revealed spouts of gas shooting outward…

Astronomers have theorized that as a field galaxy falls into a cluster of galaxies, it encounters the cloud of hot gas at the centre of the cluster. As the…

Corrosion of steel in concrete is a global problem, leading to billions of dollar in repair and maintenance cost. A reliable diagnosis of the condition of a reinforced concrete structure is the basis for an effective life cycle management.
Potential mapping allows a location of areas with a high risk of chloride induced corrosion of steel in concrete. Typically, a half cell potential is measured with a high resistive voltmeter between an external reference electrode and the reinforcement. However, this method requires the local destruction of the concrete cover to establish a galvanic contact between steel bars and the reference electrode. In some cases older structures cannot be analysed reliably due to the discontinuity of the reinforcement.
The novel Delta-Sensor Concrete Corrosion Analyser overcomes these disadvantages by measuring without a reinforcement connection through a direct measurement of the surface potentials between three CuSO4 half cells and the determination of the field gradient in the vicinity of depassivated reinforcement areas. The results are plotted in a corrosion map, showing precisely the position of critical areas in the concrete structure.

Not long ago, it would have taken several years to run a high-resolution simulation on a global climate model. But using some of the most powerful…

What time is it? The answer, no matter what your initial reference may be — a wristwatch, a smartphone, or an alarm clock — will always trace back to the…

While the Martinis Lab at UC Santa Barbara has been focusing on quantum computation, former postdoctoral fellow Pedram Roushan and several colleagues have been…

Lead author Dominik Riechers, Cornell assistant professor of astronomy, and an international team of researchers gazed back – with the Atacama Large…

A study at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory suggests for the first time how scientists might deliberately engineer…

The newly developed process combines the LIFT (Laser Induced Forward Transfer) process and screen printing to produce the front contacts of solar cells.
The combination allows the minimization of contact and line resistances even in industrial scale production and is associated with substantially reduced costs of materials. In particular, silver is being replaced with nickel or copper.
In addition to saving costs by not using silver the process optimizes the contact and line resistance which increases the solar cell's efficiency.
The German patent has been granted.

The use of light for information transfer allows high data transfer rates. Processing of the data is done almost exclusively electronically in integrated, silicium based components. The novel electro-optical component is based on the rapid change of transmission characteristics of an optical wave guide by means of the application of electric potentials, respectively the induction of electrical currents. It offers high electric band and can be operated on low voltages.

This technology here describes an immune-therapeutic approach with dendritic cells (DC) for the treatment of cancer. It overcomes constraints of current DC therapy models like limited IL-12 production, a cytokine which is critical for immunologic memory. Therefore and most importantly, cytotoxic T cells induced by these designer DC combine a memory-like phenotype and a markedly increased secondary expandability with a high lytic capacity. Furthermore, this approach is by far more cost efficient than competing products.

After 10 years journeying through the solar system, the ESA probe, Rosetta, will deploy its landing craft, Philae, to attempt the first ever soft landing on a…

Already on 8 November, the ground crew sent the computer sequence that controlled the landing to Philae via the orbiter. On Monday, the lander was switched on…

Researchers examined three combinations of devices and apps most commonly used by private pilots: the Appareo Stratus 2 receiver with the ForeFlight app; the…