It takes a few moments for the sound of thunder to reach our ears after a flash of lightning. This phenomenon is due to the photoacoustic (PA) effect where materials near the lightning instantly expand as the optical energy of the lightning is absorbed and converted into thermal energy. Using this PA effect, photoacoustic computed tomography (PACT) has become a premier preclinical and clinical imaging modality to take images inside the body without using a contrast medium. However, its low-quality images, which can be improved with multiple ultrasound sensors and a multi-channel data acquisition (DAQ) system, ...

· Diseased neurons have pathology in which proteins become misfolded and toxic · Normally supportive cells attack the diseased neurons and destroy them · This pathology occurs in 90% of ALS patient brains and in frontotemporal dementia and Alzheimer’s disease CHICAGO --- Northwestern Medicine scientists have discovered two ways to preserve diseased upper motor neurons that would normally be destroyed in ALS, based on a study in mice. Upper motor neurons initiate movement, ...

Curtin University researchers believe rising sea temperatures are to blame for the plummeting number of invertebrates such as molluscs and sea urchins at Rottnest Island off Western Australia, with some species having declined by up to 90 per cent between 2007 and 2021. Lead author Adjunct Professor Fred Wells, from Curtin’s School of Molecular and Life Sciences, said the west end of Rottnest Island had suffered a “catastrophic decline” in biodiversity. “Since 1982, we have monitored biodiversity of marine molluscs and echinoderms ...

This study is led by Dr. Shaowei Chen (University of California). Natural gas reforming accounts for 95% of the hydrogen gas produced in the United States; yet the hydrogen is non-sustainable and “grey”, as it originates from fossil fuels . To obtain sustainable “green” hydrogen gas, electrochemical water splitting by using renewable electricity has emerged as one of the most promising technologies, which consists of hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) at the cathode and oxygen evolution reaction (OER) at the anode . Yet, due to the sluggish electron-transfer kinetics and complex reaction pathways, OER typically entails a large overpotential and severely ...

By Jovina Ang SMU Office of Research & Tech Transfer – There are many reasons why knowledge management is important for an organisation. Among the many reasons, the most mentioned are: Speed up access to information and knowledge, or to people who hold the information you need; Improve decision-making processes; Promote innovation due to the sharing of ideas, collaboration and access to the latest information; Improve the efficiency and productivity via reducing the tendency to “reinvent the wheel”; Increase customer ...

After competing in the finals with the University College London, which presented Bubble Worlds, the research team led by Dr. Sona Kwak from the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST; President Seok Jin Yoon) presented "CollaBot" and received the best award in the "hardware, design, and interface" category at the Robot Design Competition hosted by the International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR) 2022, which was held at the Chamber of Commerce in Florence, Italy (December 13-16, 2022). Previous studies on social robots were primarily based on humanoid robots that understand the context of situations and provide a range ...

By Alvin Lee SMU Office of Research & Tech Transfer – When Chinese consumer electronics giant Xiaomi (小米) listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (SEHK) in June 2018, it followed the well-beaten path travelled by earlier mainland companies, ranging from high-tech predecessors Tencent (腾讯, 0700.HK) to non-tech companies such as Tsingtao Brewery (0168.HK) and China Eastern Airlines (0670.HK). While the IPO raised US$4.72 billion in the tech world’s biggest float in four years, it garnered extra attention for being the first SEHK listing with dual-class shares ...

By Alistair Jones SMU Office of Research & Tech Transfer – The life of a researcher is not for everyone, but for Yuliya Dzyuban, a Research Fellow in the new College of Integrative Studies at Singapore Management University (SMU), it's a perfect fit. “With time, I realised that studying is what I do best and enjoy the most. Research offers opportunities for endless learning,” she says. “There are always new projects, new challenges, new ideas and evolving methods. I love the fact that I can learn something ...

By Alistair Jones SMU Office of Research & Tech Transfer – Despite hero moments in movies where fingers clatter at dizzying speed across computer keyboards, not everyone in the real world finds code fascinating, nor algorithms intriguing. In fact, there is a worldwide shortage of skilled data scientists and software engineers. David Lo, a Professor of Computer Science at Singapore Management University (SMU), suggests two reasons for the shortfall. “First, software today is everywhere; organisations, companies, governments ...

An analysis of fossils of non-avialan theropod dinosaurs – a dinosaur clade that includes an array of body sizes – has provided findings that run contrary to expectations regarding the factors that inform the evolution of body size diversity. “Once quantified and analyzed in a phylogenetic framework [like this], we predict that diverse growth strategies will be recognized in other clades,” say the study’s authors. Over evolutionary history, many taxa have evolved very large and very small body sizes, and even closely related species can exhibit widely disparate sizes. ...

In the UK, disparities in mortality risk factors exist between ethnic groups, with differences in overall mortality, top causes of mortality and individual mortality risk factors, according to a new study published this week in the open-access journal PLOS Global Public Health by I. King Jordan of Georgia Institute of Technology, US, and colleagues. Despite the progress made in improving mortality rate, life expectancy, and disease survival outcomes in the last century, health disparities between various population ...

RICHLAND, Wash.—There’s a lot of potentially useful raw materials bound up in used face masks, grocery bags and food wrap. But it has been much cheaper to keep making more of these single-use plastics than to recover and recycle them. Now, an international research team led by the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has cracked the code that stymied previous attempts to break down these persistent plastics. They reported their discovery in today’s issue of Science. Low temperature and reaction control Typically, recycling plastics requires ‘cracking’ or ...

The meat-eating dinosaurs known as theropods that roamed the ancient Earth ranged in size from the bus-sized T. rex to the smaller, dog-sized Velociraptor. Scientists puzzling over how such wildly different dinosaur sizes evolved recently found – to their surprise– that smaller and larger theropod dinosaurs like these didn’t necessarily get that way merely by growing slower or faster. In a new paper published in Science, “Developmental strategies underlying gigantism and miniaturization ...

High-resolution microscopy techniques, for example electron microscopy or super-resolution microscopy, produce huge amounts of data. The visualization, analysis and dissemination of such large imaging data sets poses significant challenges. Now, these tasks can be carried out using MoBIE, which stands for Multimodal Big Image Data Exploration, a new user-friendly, freely available tool developed by researchers from the University of Göttingen and EMBL Heidelberg. This means that researchers such as biologists, who rely ...

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – Feb. 23, 2023 – Wake Forest University and Wake Forest University School of Medicine will receive $3 million over five years from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to help researchers take the next steps in nearly a decade of research that indicates dance can promote cognitive health. The grant funds a new study called IGROOVE that will help researchers determine what kinds of dance, the frequency of the dance classes and what aspects of the dance class – music, social interaction, cognitive challenge – affect fitness, memory and brain health. The research will be co-led by Christina ...

Irvine, Calif., Feb. 23, 2023 – People often associate Escherichia coli with contaminated food, but E. coli has long been a workhorse in biotechnology. Scientists at the University of California, Irvine have demonstrated that the bacterium has further value as part of a system to detect heavy metal contamination in water. E. coli exhibit a biochemical response in the presence of metal ions, a slight change that researchers were able to observe with chemically assembled gold nanoparticle optical sensors. Through a machine-learning ...

INDIANAPOLIS—With a $2.9 million grant from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, researchers from Indiana University School of Medicine are working to improve food insecurity in Indiana and ultimately improve the health of people in Indiana. Individuals who experience food insecurity–inconsistent access to affordable and nutritious food–are more susceptible to a variety of health conditions, including hypertension and Type 2 Diabetes. The FoRKS: Food Resources ...

A team from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Florida State University has designed a new blueprint for solid-state batteries that are less dependent on specific chemical elements, particularly critical metals that are challenging to source due to supply chain issues. Their work, reported recently in the journal Science, could advance solid-state batteries that are efficient and affordable.   Touted for their high energy density and superior safety, solid-state batteries could be a game-changer for the electric car industry. ...

The National Center to Reframe Aging — the nation’s leading organization dedicated to reshaping the conversation about older people — has established a new advisory board with 16 members from such diverse professional backgrounds as communications and public relations, research, policy, and law. These board members were tapped to bring knowledge, strategic thinking, and interpersonal attributes to their role; to identify key organizations and decision-makers who can help advance the initiative; and support activities aligning with National Center project goals. “We look forward to working with this talented group of advisors to grow ...

In 2018, a team of physicists at Purdue University invented a device which experimentally showed quasiparticles interfering for the first time in the fractional quantum Hall effect at filling factor v=1/3.  Further development of these heterostructures has allowed the Manfra Group to expand their research to experiments that explore counterflowing charged edge modes at the 2/3 fractional quantum Hall state. They have recently published their findings, “Half-Integer Conductance Plateau at the ν = 2/3 Fractional Quantum Hall State in a Quantum Point Contact,” in Physical Review Letters on February 17, 2023.  This ...

Fungal pathogens that cause die-back in grape, avocado, citrus, nut and other crops has found a new host and is infecting conifer trees causing Pine Ghost Canker in urban forest areas of Southern California. The canker can be deadly to trees. Scientists from University of California, Davis, first spotted evidence that the pathogens had moved to pines during a routine examination of trees in Orange County in 2018. Over four years, they found that more than 30 mature pines had been infected in an area of nearly 100 acres, according ...

Over the last few decades, antimicrobial resistance has become a major public health concern globally. This has led to a search for alternative methods of treating microbial infections. One such innovation is the discovery of antimicrobial properties of certain peptides. Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are short peptides found in most animals, plants, and microorganisms as a natural defense against infections. AMPs combat harmful bacteria via a nonspecific mechanism that prevents them from developing antimicrobial resistance. Despite these exceptional abilities, research on AMPs is being hindered because the existing systems for identifying candidate ...

The sheer volume of ‘Big Data’ produced today by various sectors is beginning to overwhelm even the extremely efficient computational techniques developed to sift through all that information. But a new computational framework based on random sampling looks set to finally tame Big Data’s ever-growing communication, memory and energy costs into something more manageable.   A paper describing the framework was published in the journal Big Data Mining and Analytics on Jan. 26.   The amount of data being produced from social networks, business transactions, the ‘Internet of Things’, finance, healthcare and beyond has exploded ...

Insilico Medicine, a clinical-stage biotech company powered by generative AI, today announces that China National Medical Products Administration (NMPA) has approved the Investigational New Drug (IND) application for ISM3312, an orally available 3CLpro inhibitor generated and designed with the support of Insilico’s proprietary generative chemistry platform Chemistry42 for the treatment of COVID-19. ISM3312 is a highly selective small molecule inhibitor with a novel molecular structure optimized from compounds which were generated and designed by Chemistry42 based on the structure of 3CL protease. It binds to ...

As air pollution in Stockholm has decreased, so has the lung capacity of children and adolescents has improved, a new study published in the European Respiratory Journal reports. The researchers from Karolinska Institutet consider the results important, since the lung health of the young greatly affects the risk of their developing chronic lung diseases later in life. “Fortunately, we’ve seen a decrease in air pollutants and therefore an increase in air quality in Stockholm over the past 20 years,” says the study’s last author ...