Researchers have identified a new form of magnetism in so-called magnetic graphene, which could point the way toward understanding superconductivity in this unusual type of material. The researchers, led by the University of Cambridge, were able to control the conductivity and magnetism of iron thiophosphate (FePS3), a two-dimensional material which undergoes a transition from an insulator to a metal when compressed. This class of magnetic materials offers new routes to understanding the physics of new magnetic states and superconductivity. Using new high-pressure techniques, the researchers have shown what happens to magnetic graphene during the transition from insulator to conductor and into ...

A Rochester Institute of Technology researcher has validated a tool measuring adherence to a popular child feeding approach used by pediatricians, nutritionists, social workers and child psychologists to assess parents' feeding practices and prevent feeding problems. The best-practice approach, known as the Satter Division of Responsibility in Feeding, has now been rigorously tested and peer reviewed, resulting in the quantifiable tool sDOR.2-6y. The questionnaire will become a standard parent survey for professionals and researchers working in the early childhood development field, predicts lead researcher ...

Astronomers may have found our galaxy's first example of an unusual kind of stellar explosion. This discovery, made with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, adds to the understanding of how some stars shatter and seed the universe with elements critical for life on Earth. This intriguing object, located near the center of the Milky Way, is a supernova remnant called Sagittarius A East, or Sgr A East for short. Based on Chandra data, astronomers previously classified the object as the remains of a massive star that exploded as a supernova, one of many kinds of exploded stars that scientists have catalogued. Using longer Chandra observations, a team of astronomers has now instead concluded that the object is left over from a different type of ...

Findings from a new study on Alzheimer's disease (AD), led by researchers at the University of Saskatchewan (USask), could eventually help clinicians identify people at highest risk for developing the irreversible, progressive brain disorder and pave the way for treatments that slow or prevent its onset. The research, published in the journal Scientific Reports in early January, has demonstrated that a shorter form of the protein peptide believed responsible for causing AD (beta-amyloid 42, or Aβ42) halts the damage-causing mechanism of ...

A pathway in the brain where alcohol addiction first develops has been identified by a team of British and Chinese researchers in a new study Could lead to more effective interventions when tackling compulsive and impulsive drinking More than 3 million deaths every year are related to alcohol use globally, according to the World Health Organisation The physical origin of alcohol addiction has been located in a network of the human brain that regulates our response to danger, according to a team of British and Chinese researchers, co-led by the University of Warwick, the University ...

On a brisk November morning in 2018, a fire sparked in a remote stretch of canyon in Butte County, California, a region nestled against the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Fueled by a sea of tinder created by drought, and propelled by powerful gusts, the flames grew and traveled rapidly. In less than 24 hours, the fire had swept through the town of Paradise and other communities, leaving a charred ruin in its wake. The Camp Fire was the costliest disaster worldwide in 2018 and, having caused 85 deaths and destroyed more than 18,000 buildings, it became both the deadliest and most destructive wildfire ...

An unusual biologically active porphyrin compound was isolated from seabed dweller Ophiura sarsii. The substance might be used as an affordable light-sensitive drug for innovative photodynamic therapy and for targeted treatment of triple-negative breast cancer and some other cancers. Researchers from the School of Biomedicine of Far Eastern Federal University (FEFU) and the University of Geneva reported the findings in Marine Drugs. The seabed dweller Ophiura sarsii, the source of the new compound, was isolated at a depth of 15-18 meters in Bogdanovich Bay, Russky Island (Vladivostok, Russia). Ophiuras may resemble ...

DALLAS - Feb. 8, 2021 - Pregnant women, who are at increased risk of preterm birth or pregnancy loss if they develop a severe case of COVID-19, need the best possible guidance on whether they should receive a COVID-19 vaccine, according to an article by two UT Southwestern obstetricians published today in JAMA. That guidance can take lessons from what is already known about other vaccines given during pregnancy. In the Viewpoint article, Emily H. Adhikari, M.D., and Catherine Y. Spong, M.D., describe how the available safety and effectiveness data, basic science of mRNA vaccines, and long history ...

DALLAS - Feb. 8, 2021 - A new nanoparticle-based drug can boost the body's innate immune system and make it more effective at fighting off tumors, researchers at UT Southwestern have shown. Their study, published in Nature Biomedical Engineering, is the first to successfully target the immune molecule STING with nanoparticles about one millionth the size of a soccer ball that can switch on/off immune activity in response to their physiological environment. "Activating STING by these nanoparticles is like exerting perpetual pressure on the accelerator to ramp up the natural innate immune response to a tumor," says study leader Jinming Gao, Ph.D., a professor in UT Southwestern's Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive ...

AURORA, Colo. (February 8, 2021) - Researchers from the Barbara Davis Center for Childhood Diabetes at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus have found that immune responses to insulin could help identify individuals most at risk for developing Type 1 diabetes. The study, out recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, measured immune responses from individuals genetically predisposed to developing Type 1 diabetes (T1D) to naturally occurring insulin and hybrid insulin peptides. Since not all genetically predisposed individuals ...

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 ...