A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in the U.S. has come up with a new type of cermet that could prove especially useful as a heat exchanger in solar power plants. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group describes how the new material was … | Continue reading
Big Data is all the rage today, but Small Data matters too! Drawing reliable conclusions from small datasets, like those from clinical trials for rare diseases or in studies of endangered species, remains one of the trickiest obstacles in statistics. Now, Cold Spring Harbor Labor … | Continue reading
Some bacterial pathogens, including those that cause strep throat and pneumonia, are able to create the components necessary to replicate their DNA without the usually required metal ions. This process may allow infectious bacteria to replicate even when the host's immune system … | Continue reading
Over the next decade, American manufacturers are facing an industrial skills gap with projections of 2 million manufacturing jobs going unfilled due to a lack of qualified and skilled applicants. A large portion of the current manufacturing workforce is nearing retirement age and … | Continue reading
You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar—or can you? In this video, Reactions explains the chemistry behind why fruit flies love vinegar so much that some entomologists call them "vinegar flies": | Continue reading
Research carried out by the University of Kent sheds light on the infanticidal behaviour of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and demonstrates that females are highly sensitive to the relative risks posed to their babies by different males. | Continue reading
Argonne scientists have identified a new class of topological materials made by inserting transition metal atoms into the atomic lattice of a well-known two-dimensional material. | Continue reading
Scientists from the School of Engineering at the University of Glasgow have developed a handheld device for taking medical readings from patients, and transferring the data to a smartphone. | Continue reading
Evgenij Zubko of Far Eastern Federal University (FEFU), in collaboration with international team members, has developed a comprehensive model to explain the results of the recent photometric study of the comet Schwassmann-Wachmann 1 (29P). The surprising findings revealed that th … | Continue reading
Anatomy, Modeling and Biomaterial Fabrication for Dental and Maxillofacial Applications provides readers with information about dental implants and biomaterial fabrication for maxillofacial procedures and dental bone / tissue repair. It will also provide valuable insights into th … | Continue reading
Personal electronic devices—smartphones, computers, TVs, tablets, screens of all kinds—are a significant and growing source of the world's electronic waste. Many of these products use nanomaterials, but little is known about how these modern materials and their tiny particles int … | Continue reading
Researchers reporting in Current Biology on October 18 have described a remarkable new species of fish that lived in the sea about 150 million years ago in the time of the dinosaurs. The new species of bony fish had teeth like a piranha, which the researchers suggest they used as … | Continue reading
Controlling individual brain cells using light-sensitive proteins has proven to be a powerful tool for probing the brain's complexities. As this branch of neuroscience has expanded, so has the demand for a diverse palette of protein tools. | Continue reading
Pioneering research has given a fascinating fresh insight into how animal nervous systems evolved from simple structures to become the complex network transmitting signals between different parts of the body. | Continue reading
Researchers in Singapore can now explain what gives the mantis shrimp, a marine crustacean that hunts by battering its prey with its club-like appendages, the most powerful punch in the animal kingdom. In a paper publishing October 19 in the journal iScience, they show that a sad … | Continue reading
Lake Vistonida in northern Greece has become an arachnophobe's worst nightmare after it was cloaked recently by massive webs spun by hundreds of thousands of small spiders. | Continue reading
In an otherwise innocuous part of Facebook's expansive Silicon Valley campus, a locked door bears a taped-on sign that reads "War Room." Behind the door lies a nerve center the social network has set up to combat fake accounts and bogus news stories ahead of upcoming elections. | Continue reading
Graphene has been hailed as the material of the future. As yet, however, little is known about whether and how graphene affects our health if it gets into the body. A team of researchers from Empa and the Adolphe Merkle Institute (AMI) in Fribourg have now conducted the first stu … | Continue reading
This week at ITF Health 2018, imec, the world-leading research and innovation hub in nanoelectronics and digital technologies, showcases elPrep 4.0, a powerful software tool to speed up human DNA sequencing analysis. elPrep accelerates whole genome and exome processing pipelines … | Continue reading
Gene AMY1, which kickstarts digestion of starch in the mouth, is associated with blood glucose levels and digestion of carbohydrates, with implications for understanding human evolutionary biology and the gut microbiome. | Continue reading
The Leaning Tower of Pisa owes its perilous angle to the weak subsoil its foundations were built upon, back in the 12th century. Its tilt, which worsened gradually until modern engineers arrested it in the late 1990s, is a good example of how incremental changes in geomechanics c … | Continue reading
A new paper written by academics at Royal Holloway and George Washington University, predicts reliable patterns in violent events occurring within wars and terrorism, regardless of geography, ethnicity and religion. | Continue reading
I bought some new socks this week. So what, you might ask. My new socks are lovely and warm and very fluffy – just right for autumn. But, when I wore them, they moulted their fluff all over my feet, and if I'm not careful they will also lose fluff into my washing machine. Again, … | Continue reading
A series of floods that hit the ancient city of Angkor would have overwhelmed and destroyed its vast water network, according to a new study that provides an explanation for the downfall of the world's biggest pre-industrial city. | Continue reading
Scientists recreated deep sea conditions from the last ice age and found that the tropical Pacific contained more carbon and less oxygen during that period than previously thought. | Continue reading
Space, that final frontier, is something that catches the attention of a country naturally inclined to believe in ideas like "Manifest Destiny" and American exceptionalism. But how well does a Space Force fit that bill? And would a Space Force reignite a military space race and f … | Continue reading
New research on plagiarism at university has revealed students are surprisingly unconcerned about a practice known as "contract cheating". | Continue reading
Trypanosoma brucei, which causes sleeping sickness, evades the immune system by repeatedly altering the structure of its surface coat. Sequencing of its genome and studies of its 3-D genome architecture have now revealed crucial molecular aspects of this strategy. | Continue reading
Particle accelerators are made of structures called cavities, which impart energy to the particle beam, kicking it forward. One type of cavity is the superconducting radio-frequency, or SRF, cavity. Usually made of niobium, SRF cavities require extreme cold to operate. A Fermilab … | Continue reading
Inside smartphones and computer displays are metals known as the rare earths. Mining and purifying these metals involves waste- and energy-intense processes. Better processes are needed. Previous work has shown that specific rare earth elements absorb light energy that can change … | Continue reading
Known since antiquity, Mercury has not yet delivered all its secrets. The international mission BepiColombo, scheduled to launch in the coming days, will study the planet's surface and compare its magnetic field with that of the Earth. | Continue reading
When we think of slavery, many of us think of historical or so-called "traditional forms" of slavery – and of the 12m people ripped from their West African homes and shipped across the Atlantic for a lifetime in the plantations of the Americas. | Continue reading
Nitrous oxide, or N2O, is a greenhouse gas that affects the ozone layer and the earth's climate. Until now, experts believed that microbes in the soil were largely responsible for its formation. Now an interdisciplinary research team from the University of Applied Sciences Bingen … | Continue reading
It's easy to find videos on YouTube exposing people's seemingly unwavering support for the actions of their political party. A 2016 video on Jimmy Kimmel's show includes Hillary Clinton supporters agreeing with her purported quotes about policies, though the actual quotes were ta … | Continue reading
Lake Eyre is one of Australia's most iconic wetlands, home to thousands of waterbirds that migrate from all over Australia and the world. But it is often dry for decades between floods. | Continue reading
A two-year cycle in the gamma-ray brightness of a blazar, a galaxy powered by a supermassive black hole, has been confirmed by 10 years of observations from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. The findings were announced today at the Eighth International Fermi Symposium meeti … | Continue reading
Fuels, plastics, and other products are made using catalysts, materials that drive chemical reactions. To design a better catalyst, scientists must get the right atoms in the right spot. Positioning the atoms can be difficult, but new research makes it easier. Researchers determi … | Continue reading
,We are now truly living in the era of big data. And it's not just companies like Facebook and YouTube that are reaping the benefits, big data is transforming science too. In the space sciences, we have an unprecedented number of satellites and ground-based instruments that monit … | Continue reading
Scientists have mapped the distribution of bumblebees in Europe and created a predictive map that can be used to monitor and mitigate bumblebee decline. | Continue reading
The discovery of a rare mineral (reidite) at the Woodleigh meteorite impact structure in Western Australia was published this week by Curtin University honours student Morgan Cox and colleagues. | Continue reading
Workers in most hand car washes in the UK are subject to some form of labour exploitation—such as excessively long hours or exceptionally low pay, according to a new report out today on Anti-Slavery Day (18 October). | Continue reading