At the heart of most electronics today are rechargeable lithium-ion batteries (LIBs). But their energy storage capacities are not enough for large-scale energy storage systems (ESSs). Lithium-sulfur batteries (LSBs) could be useful in such a scenario due to their higher theoretical energy storage capacity. They could even replace LIBs in other applications like drones, given their light weight and lower cost. But the same mechanism that is giving them all this power is keeping them becoming a widespread practical reality. Unlike LIBs, the reaction pathway in LSBs leads to an accumulation of solid lithium sulfide (Li2S6) and liquid lithium polysulfide (LiPS), causing a loss of active material from the sulfur cathode (positively charged electrode) and corrosion of the lithium ...

In civil engineering, flexural beams are used to control the effect of vibrations that can cause cracks to appear in surfaces (concrete slabs) and beams. This is particularly important in buildings that require high tensile strength and where the use of machinery can cause a lot of vibrations that can disturb structural integrity. One metric to determine the reliability of beams is the deflection value, which should be appropriately low relative to the structure the beams are used in. Engineering codes such as ACI codes include provisions for such values and there are a number of methods to calculate them. Deflection is altered practically by reinforcing the construction materials with concrete or steel. In this review, engineers ...

Biological systems can harness their living cells for growth and regeneration, but engineering systems cannot. Until now. Qiming Wang and researchers at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering are harnessing living bacteria to create engineering materials that are strong, tolerant, and resilient. The research is published in Advanced Materials. "The materials we are making are living and self-growing," said Wang, the Stephen Schrank Early Career Chair in Civil and Environmental Engineering and assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering in the ...

An international collaboration among researchers from Finland, Sweden, UK and the USA has captured ribosomes translating messenger RNA expressed from the maternally inherited mitochondrial genome. Utilising the latest advances in cryo-electron microscopy, the group discovered a novel mechanism that mitochondrial ribosomes use for the synthesis and delivery of newly made proteins to prevent premature misfolding. Disruptions to protein folding can lead to devastating human diseases. There is a familiar saying, "It's all in the genes". As modern archaeology reveals, the DNA that encodes genes can be found among the remnants of our ancestors and from any organism, small and large, that once roamed the earth. The genetic blueprint alone is ...

According to a research conducted by JCDR, at least 9 out of 10 adults suffer from low health literacy in India. Health literacy is a vital aspect of any nation's growth - be it developed, underdeveloped or a developing nation. A team of researchers lead by Ruban Nersisson, at the School of Electrical Engineering, Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore, India, have written a review on Tinnitus, a disorder of the ear characterized by a ringing sound in one or both of the ears. "We intend to spread awareness of a common hearing disorder which ironically is not commonly known to people.", says Nersisson. 'Tinnitus', is a hearing disorder that has been affecting around 7-8% of the human population since ...

They have improved a process for vertically depositing a solution made from an inexpensive perovskite solute onto a moving substrate below. Not only have they discovered the crucial role played by one of the solvents used, but they have also taken a closer look at the aging and storage properties of the solution. Solar cells made of crystalline silicon still account for the lion's share of roof installations and solar farms. But other technologies have long since become established as well - such as those that convert sunlight into electrical energy through use of extremely thin layers of solar-cell material deposited upon a substrate. The perovskite solar cells that Prof. Eva Unger and her team at the Helmholtz-Zentrum ...

The regulation of satiety is an important factor that determines a higher or lower intake of energy and, therefore, has a considerable impact on the development and/or progression of obesity. The team made up of the researchers Lucia Camacho Barcia, Jesús García-Gavilán, Christopher Papandreou, and Mònica Bulló that leads the research group in Nutrition and Metabolic Diseases of the Department of Biochemistry and Biotechnology (Universitat Rovira i Virgili - Tarragona-Spain) have worked  with researchers from Denmark ...

Long-term sleep deprivation is detrimental to health, increasing the risk of psychiatric and somatic disorders, such as depression and cardiovascular diseases. And yet, little is known about the molecular biological mechanisms set in motion by sleep deprivation which underlie related adverse health effects. In a recently published study, the University of Helsinki, the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health and the Finnair airline investigated dynamic changes to DNA methylation in shift workers. DNA methylation denotes epigenetic regulation that modifies gene function and regulates gene activity without changing the sequence of bases in the DNA. Short-term genetic changes caused by DNA methylation are not well known. While ...

Physicists from Switzerland, Germany and Ukraine have proposed an innovative new data storage medium. The technique is based on specific properties of antiferromagnetic materials that had previously resisted experimental examination. Using nanoscale quantum sensors, an international research team has succeeded in exploring certain previously uncharted physical properties of an antiferromagnetic material. Based on their results, the researchers developed a concept for a new storage medium published in the journal Nature Physics. The project was coordinated by researchers from the Department of Physics and the Swiss Nanoscience Institute at the University of Basel. Antiferromagnets make up 90 percent of all magnetically ordered materials. Unlike ferromagnets such as iron, ...

Using laws governing human rights may be the best way of harnessing international legislation and tribunals to protect the Amazon, a new study shows. Safeguarding the rainforest is a critical priority because of the ecosystem's planetary importance. Recent increases in deforestation and fires in the region have made this even more urgent. The new research, published in the Review of European, Comparative and International Environmental Law (RECIEL), says using human rights law to protect the Amazon is more likely to have stronger prospects, as campaigners wouldn't need to submit information about more than one nation for it to be upheld. Courts would only need to judge that environmental damage violated the rights of either certain individuals or tribal and indigenous peoples. The ...

The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has led an international team which has developed an algorithm called COSMIC BIRTH to analyse large scale cosmic structures. This new computation method will permit the analysis of the evolution of the structure of dark matter from the early universe until the formation of present day galaxies. This work was recently published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS). The IAC researcher, a co-author of the article and leader of the group of Cosmology and Large Scale Structure (LSS) Francisco-Shu Kitaura explains that one of the key aspects of this algorithm "consists in expressing the observations as if they had been detected in the early universe, which ...

Moralities of Intelligent Machines is a project that investigates people's attitudes towards moral choices made by artificial intelligence. In the latest study completed under the project, study participants read short narratives where either a robot, a somewhat humanoid robot known as iRobot, a robot with a strong humanoid appearance called iClooney or a human being encounters a moral problem along the lines of the trolley dilemma, making a specific decision. The participants were also shown images of these agents, after which they assessed the morality of their decisions. The study was funded by the Jane and Aatos Erkko Foundation and the Academy of Finland. The trolley dilemma is a problem ...

Electric current is deflected by a magnetic field - in conducting materials this leads to the so-called Hall effect. This effect is often used to measure magnetic fields. A surprising discovery has now been made at TU Wien, in collaboration with scientists from the Paul Scherrer Institute (Switzerland), McMater University (Canada), and Rice University (USA): an exotic metal made of cerium, bismuth and palladium was examined and a giant Hall effect was found to be produced by the material, in the total absence of any magnetic field. The reason for this unexpected result lies in the unusual properties of the electrons: They behave as if magnetic ...

The pituitary gland is a pea-sized endocrine gland composed of two structurally and functionally separate parts known as anterior and posterior lobes. The pituitary gland's anterior lobe secretes six hormones essential to growth, reproduction, and other basic physiological functions. Abnormal development of the pituitary gland, or hypopituitarism, can cause mild or complete deficiency of one or more pituitary hormones, which manifests as highly varying symptoms. Tumours mainly cause hypopituitarism in humans, but a congenital factor can also be associated with the disorder. The POU1F1 gene regulates the development of the ...

In Sweden, approximately one in five adults suffers from dental anxiety or phobia. The number has decreased over time, but still an important part of the population have major problems, according to a recent doctoral thesis from the University of Gothenburg. The thesis includes a nationwide interview study involving 3,500 adult individuals, randomly selected from the general population of Sweden. Nineteen percent of the participants reported some degree of dental anxiety, fear or phobia. The results showed that 4.7% of the respondents described their dental anxiety as severe, 4.5% as moderate and 9.8% as low. The remaining 80.9% reported no dental anxiety. The proportion with no dental ...

Scientists of the P. N. Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (LPI RAS), the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) and the Institute for Nuclear Research of RAS (INR RAS) studied the arrival directions of astrophysical neutrinos with energies more than a trillion electronvolts (TeV) and came to an unexpected conclusion: all of them are born near black holes in the centers of distant active galaxies powerful radio sources. Previously, only neutrinos with the highest energies were assumed to be obtained in sources of this class. It is believed that there are massive black holes in the centers ...

Invasive lobular carcinoma (ILC) is a type of breast cancer that begins in the milk-producing glands (lobules) of the breast. It covers 10-15% of all breast cancer cases, has a high risk of late recurrence, unique metastatic sites, high sensitivity to hormones, unpredictable responses to therapies, unique histopathology, distinctive biology, and resists chemotherapy. More than 90% of ILC tumors also contain estrogen receptors, meaning that they can receive hormone signals from the body e.g. estradiol, that can spur their growth and metastasis. Despite all this, ILC is relatively understudied compared to other breast cancers, and as a result, there have been very few models developed to study it. The reason is ...

Water is an essential element for all living things. Understanding the dynamics of water in trees is crucial for understanding the consequences of climate change and altered water availability for forest ecosystems. This study, which is a product of a joint research project with Samuli Junttila PhD, and Professor Masato Katoh of Shinshu University's Institute for Mountain Science and others demonstrates a new laser scanning based method that can be used to monitor changes in leaf water content of tree communities. Lasers can be used to measure and monitor the leaf water content of trees and plants, because the reflection of laser light at the shortwave infrared region is changed due to varying leaf water ...

Two in five of the world's plant species are at risk of extinction. In the face of climate change, understanding why certain plant species are vulnerable to extinction while others prevail is more urgent than ever before. Previous studies linking climate and plant vital rates have found relatively modest effects, sometimes leading to the conclusion that other threats, such as land use change, may still be more important than climate drivers. However, these conclusions could result from wrong assumptions about which times of the year (which "time window") climate ...

- A silicone membrane for wearable devices is more comfortable and breathable thanks to better-sized pores made with the help of citric acid crystals. - A new preparation technique fabricates thin, silicone-based patches that rapidly wick water away from the skin. The technique could reduce the redness and itching caused by wearable biosensors that trap sweat beneath them. The technique was developed by bioengineer and professor Young-Ho Cho and his colleagues at KAIST and reported in the journal Scientific Reports last month. "Wearable bioelectronics are becoming more attractive for the day-to-day monitoring of biological compounds ...

"The lengthy groundwork is finally complete," says Jouko Rikkinen, Professor of Botany at the University of Helsinki, Finland, giving a sigh of relief. The research article just published focuses on species diversity in the genus Leptogium, a group of jelly lichens that are common in the mountain forests of East Africa. Thousands of lichen specimens were collected from Kenya and Tanzania in 2009-2017, including nearly 600 Leptogium specimens. DNA analyses revealed that the dataset on Leptogium included more than 70 different species, of which no more than a dozen or so are previously known. DNA analyses were necessary, as ...

The course and severity of COVID-19 in individual patients is largely influenced by the interaction between the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus and the human immune system. Normally, the antiviral immune response of natural killer cells (NK cells) is an important step in combating viral replication in the early phase of the infection. On their surface, these killer cells have special, activating receptors, including the NKG2C receptor, which communicates with an infected cell via one of its specialised surface structures, HLA-E. This interaction results in the destruction of virus-infected cells. However, due to a genetic ...

Professor Jeremy Michalek and his Ph.D student Matthew Bruchon have published a study investigating what vehicle electrification would look like in a world where ridesourcing companies like Uber and Lyft were held responsible for the air pollution and carbon emissions created by their business. Ridesourcing has changed the way people travel, affecting air emissions in the process. Researchers like those at the Center for Air, Climate and Energy Solutions (CACES) have quantified the negative health effects of airborne particulates created by cars in rates of cardiovascular and respiratory disease, and they're also the largest source of greenhouse gasses in the US. With public sector fleets such as the US Postal Service ...

Mount Sinai researchers have identified a neural pathway through which the brain detects errors and guides subsequent behavioral improvement. This process, called cognitive control, is frequently dysregulated in a wide range of psychiatric disorders. The team's research, published February 19 in Neuron, also suggests that neurostimulation of this brain pathway could provide an important mechanism for attention adjustments following behavioral errors. When errors are committed, such as missing a stop sign or running a red light while driving, it's important for our survival to immediately adapt behavior by paying more attention to prevent further errors. This ability to adapt behavior after erroneous actions is one of the key components of human cognitive control. "Deficits ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. - Converting the ground under electrical transmission towers into spaces for wildlife can enable fragmented populations to connect with one another, increasing local biodiversity and providing animals around the globe an important tool for adapting to climate change, a new study found. "The most common way species respond to climate change is to try to shift their range - i.e., go live somewhere else," Oregon State University scientist Virginia Morandini said. "When landscapes become fragmented, usually because of human activity, it greatly hinders animals' ability to move their range. That's why it's so important for biodiversity conservation to try to get their environments connected." For this study, Morandini ...