An international team of scientists has invented the equivalent of body armour for extremely fragile quantum systems, which will make them robust enough to be used as the basis for a new generation of low-energy electronics. The scientists applied the armour by gently squashing droplets of liquid metal gallium onto the materials, coating them with gallium oxide. Protection is crucial for thin materials such as graphene, which are only a single atom thick - essentially two-dimensional (2D) - and so are easily damaged by conventional layering technology, said Matthias Wurdack, who is the lead author of the group's publication in Advanced Materials. "The protective coating ...

A framework designed to provide detailed information on agricultural groundwater use in arid regions has been developed by KAUST researchers in collaboration with the Saudi Ministry of Environment Water and Agriculture (MEWA). "Groundwater is a precious resource, but we don't pay for it to grow our food, we just pump it out," says Oliver López, who worked on the project with KAUST's Matthew McCabe and co-workers. "When something is free, we are less likely to keep track of it, but it is critical that we measure groundwater extraction because it impacts both food and water security, not just regionally, but globally." Saudi Arabia's farmland is often irrigated via center pivots that tap underground aquifer sources. The team has built a powerful tool ...

Osaka, Japan - Bone morphogenetic protein (BMP) has a strong osteogenic (bone forming) ability. BMP has already been clinically applied to spinal fusion and non-union fractures. However, dose-dependent side effects related to BMP use, such as inflammatory reactions at the administration site, prevent widespread use. For safe use, it was necessary to clarify how the BMP signaling pathway is controlled. In a report published in Bone Research, a group of researchers from Osaka University and Ehime University has recently identified a novel role for the protein Smurf2 in regulating bone formation by BMP. When BMP transmits its message within cells, it can induce rapid bone formation. Previous studies have shown that Smurf2 can control another similar ...

Lithium metal batteries could double the amount of energy held by lithium-ion batteries, if only their anodes didn't break down into small pieces when they were used. Now, researchers led by Prof. CUI Guanglei from the Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology (QIBEBT) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) have identified what causes lithium metal batteries (LMBs) to "self-destruct" and proposed a way to prevent it. The findings were published in Angewandte Chemie on Jan. 19. This offers hope of radically enhancing the energy held in batteries without any increase in their size, and at reduced cost. In fact, LMBs were the original concept for long-lasting ...

Tiny nanoparticles can be furnished with dyes and could be used for new imaging techniques, as chemists and physicists at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) show in a recent study. The researchers have also been the first to fully determine the particles' internal structure. Their results were published in the renowned journal Angewandte Chemie. Single-chain nanoparticles (SCNPs) are an attractive material for chemical and biomedical applications. They are created from just a single chain of molecules that folds into a particle whose circumference measures three to five nanometres. "Because they are so small, they can travel everywhere in the human body and be used for a wide variety of purposes," says Professor Wolfgang ...

In humans, differences in personalities have been evident since the ancient times. Personality in animals has long been ignored, but recently this question has received increasing research interest as it has been realized that personality has evolutionary and ecological significance. An international team of behavioral biologists from Austria, Brazil and the Netherlands, with Vedrana Å lipogor from the University of Vienna as leading author of the study, designed a set of tasks to assess personality of common marmosets. These results have just been published in American Journal of Primatology. Marmosets are small highly social New World monkeys that parallel humans in their social organization, as they live in cohesive ...

Researchers from the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) warn of the impact the current tourism model in the Mediterranean islands has on the production of marine litter on beaches, and recommend taking advantage of the situation generated by the Covid19 pandemic to rethink a new more sustainable model. The research, recently published in the journal Scientific Reports, shows that the recreational use of Mediterranean island beaches during the summer is responsible for up to 80% of the marine litter accumulating on those beaches, and generates huge amounts of microplastics through the fragmentation ...

A German-Chinese research team has found a new synthetic route to produce biofuel from biomass. The chemists converted the substance 5-hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF) produced from biomass into 2,5-dimethylfuran (DMF), which could be suitable as a biofuel. Compared to previous methods, they achieved a higher yield and selectivity under milder reaction conditions. The team led by Dr. Baoxiang Peng and Professor Martin Muhler from the Laboratory of Industrial Chemistry at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) and the group led by Professor Christof Hättig from the RUB Chair for Theoretical Chemistry described the method together with colleagues from Changzhou, ...

Solar energy is one of the most abundant renewable energy sources, and effective solar technologies have great potential to alleviate the grand challenges of rising global energy demands, while reducing associated emissions. Solar energy is capable of satisfying the electrical and thermal-energy needs of diverse end-users by means of photovoltaic (PV) and solar thermal (ST) technologies, respectively. Recently, hybrid photovoltaic-thermal (PVT) concepts have been proposed that synergistically combine the benefits of PV and ST technologies, and are capable of generating both electricity and useful heat simultaneously from the same area and component. Spectral splitting is an emerging approach for designing high-performance PVT solar collectors, which employ advanced designs ...

The molecular details of how SARS-CoV-2 enters cells and infects them are still not clear. Researchers at Uppsala University have tested the bioinformatic predictions made by another research group and have identified receptors that could be important players in the process. The results are presented in the journal Science Signaling and at the AAAS Annual Meeting held this week. The spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 binds the protein ACE2 on the outside of the human cell. This triggers a series of events that leads to invasion of the cell by the virus. The molecular details of this process have remained obscure ...

Femtosecond direct laser writing as a 3D printing technology has been one of the key building blocks for miniaturization in modern times. It has transformed the field of complex microoptics since the early 2000s. Especially medical engineering and consumer electronics as vastly growing fields benefit from these developments. It is now possible to create robust, monolithic and nearly perfectly aligned freeform optical systems on almost arbitrary substrates such as image sensors or optical fibers. Simultaneously, the miniaturisation of spectroscopic measurement devices has been advanced, for instance based on quantum dot or nanowire technology. These are based on computational approaches, which have the drawback of ...

For decades, the speed of our computers has been growing at a steady pace. The processor of the first IBM PC released 40 years ago, operated at a rate of roughly 5 million clock cycles per second (4.77 MHz). Today, the processors in our personal computers run around 1000 times faster. However, with current technology, they're not likely to get any faster than that. For the last 15 years, the clock rate of single processor cores has stalled at a few Gigahertz (1 Gigahertz = 1 billion clock cycles per second). And the old and tested approach of cramming ...

In diagnostic medicine, biopsies, where a sample of tissue is extracted for analysis, is a common tool for the detection of many conditions. But this approach has several drawbacks - it can be painful, doesn't always extract the diseased tissue, and can only be used in a sufficiently advanced disease stage, making it, in some cases, too late for intervention. These concerns have encouraged researchers to find less invasive and more accurate options for diagnoses. Professor Nir Friedman and Dr. Ronen Sadeh of the Life Sciences Institute and School of Computer Engineering have published a study in Nature Biotechnology that shows how a wide range of diseases can be detected through a simple ...

In certain materials, electrical and mechanical effects are closely linked: for example, the material may change its shape when an electrical field is applied or, conversely, an electrical field may be created when the material is deformed. Such electromechanically active materials are very important for many technical applications. Usually, such materials are special, inorganic crystals, which are hard and brittle. For this reason, so-called ferroelectric polymers are now being used. They are characterised by the fact that their polymer chains exist simultaneously in two different microstructures: some areas are strongly ...

A study has described genetic changes in patients with the most common form of hereditary kidney disease that affects an estimated 12.5 million people worldwide. The research, which focussed on Polycystic Kidney Disease (PKD) in Ireland, provides insights into PKD that will assist doctors and patients in the management of this of inherited condition. The study, led by researchers from the RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences, is published in the European Journal of Human Genetics. In the research, a cohort of 169 patients with PKD in Ireland were analysed. The genetic changes were identified in up ...

Results from a new study which draws on survey data collected during the peak of the first wave of the pandemic suggests that being forced to slow down life, as a consequence of lockdown, has had significant, positive impacts for many people and their families. The research, recently published in the British Journal of Psychiatry from a team at the University of Bath with international colleagues, analysed survey results from 385 caregivers of children aged 6-16 both in the UK and Portugal. Individuals completed an online questionnaire between 1 May 2020 and 27 June 2020. This cohort had ...

Swapping the car for walking, cycling and e-biking even just one day a week makes a significant impact on personal carbon emissions in cities. 'Active transport' - cycling, e-biking or walking - can help tackle the climate crisis according to a new study led by the University of Oxford's Transport Studies Unit and including researchers from Imperial's Centre for Environmental Policy as part of the EU-funded project PASTA: Physical Activity Through Sustainable Transport Approaches. Meeting greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets requires a significant move away from motorised transport. The team found that shifting to active transport could save as ...

Molecular iodine, a major emission from the ocean, can quickly convert to iodic oxoacids even under weak daylight conditions. These oxoacids lead rapidly to aerosol particles that significantly affect climate and human health. Iodine-containing vapors that are emitted from oceans are a major source of aerosol particles. "Despite their importance to the climate, the formation of marine particles has been poorly understood," says Siddharth Iyer, Postdoctoral Researcher in Aerosol Physics Laboratory at Tampere University. In this research, the formation of aerosol particles form from iodine-containing vapours under marine boundary layer conditions were studied. The experiments were carried out in the ultra-clean CLOUD chamber in CERN, where the nucleation and growth rates as well as ...

Cells, like humans, cast votes to make decisions as a group. But how do they know what to vote for? Researchers at the Francis Crick Institute and King's College London have uncovered how cells actively seek information in order to make faster and better collective decisions to coordinate the growth of new blood vessels. This provides a new basis for understanding intelligence in cells. The process of how cells precisely and quickly coordinate action when they create new tissue is complex. They must collectively decide which cells should take on specific jobs and ensure that not too ...

Is a quantum machine really more efficient than a conventional machine for performing calculations? Demonstrating this 'advantage' experimentally is particularly complex and a major research challenge around the world1. Scientists from the CNRS2, the University of Edinburgh (Scotland) and the QC Ware, Corp., (France and USA) have just proved that a quantum machine can perform a given verification task in seconds when the same exercise would take a time equivalent to the age of the universe for a conventional computer. For this demonstration, they combined a complex interactive algorithm that solves a certain type of mathematical problem with limited information and a simple experimental photonics ...

Goal 7 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aims to ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all by 2030. Yet according to new research by Copenhagen Business School the poor planning and execution of decarbonisation strategies in emerging markets challenges the aims of Goal 7. "In the effort to produce renewable energy and decarbonise their economies, emerging countries have neglected the effect on marginalised populations, which could ultimately prove unsustainable for all," says Assistant Professor Jacobo Ramirez from the ...

An important class of challenging computational problems, with applications in graph theory, neural networks, artificial intelligence and error-correcting codes can be solved by multiplying light signals, according to researchers from the University of Cambridge and Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology in Russia. In a paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, they propose a new type of computation that could revolutionise analogue computing by dramatically reducing the number of light signals needed while simplifying the search for the best mathematical solutions, allowing for ultra-fast optical computers. Optical or ...

A way of using machine learning to more accurately identify patients with a mix of psychotic and depressive symptoms has been developed by researchers at the University of Birmingham. Patients with depression or psychosis rarely experience symptoms of purely one or the other illness. Historically, this has meant that mental health clinicians give a diagnosis of a 'primary' illness, but with secondary symptoms. Making an accurate diagnosis is a big challenge for clinicians and diagnoses often do not accurately reflect the complexity of individual experience or indeed neurobiology. Clinicians diagnosing psychosis, for example, would frequently regard depression as a secondary illness, with implications for treatment decisions which focus more on ...

The outbreak of COVID-19 raised a question about the relationship between anthropogenic emissions and air pollution, which has aroused heated discussion. Research on air-quality changes caused by the lockdowns in different areas shows similar substantial reductions in primary emissions. However, regional disparities exist in responses of secondary pollutants to emissions reduction, especially fine particulate matter and ozone (O3). Professor Ding Aijun and his team from Nanjing University explored global air-quality changes during COVID-19 lockdowns and regional disparities in O3 responses to emission reductions. They integrated multiple observational datasets, including global air quality ...

In a new study published in Journal of Extracellular Vesicles, Chen-Yu Zhang's group and Antonio Vidal-Puig's group at University of Cambridge report that pancreatic β cells secrete miR-29 family members (miR-29a, miR-29b and miR-29c) in response to high levels of free fatty acids (FFAs). These β cell-derived miR-29s are delivered to the liver, promoting insulin resistance and enhancing hepatic glucose output. Over 100 years after insulin was discovered, it was believed that pancreatic β cells only secreted a single hormone--insulin. Pancreatic β cell-derived insulin regulates glucose homeostasis by binding with the insulin receptors located in the liver, skeletal ...