News Articles

Reluctance to share data about personal energy use is likely to be a major obstacle when implementing 'smart' technologies designed to monitor use and support energy efficient behaviors, according to new research led by academics at The University of Nottingham.
The study, published online by the journal Nature Climate Change, found that while more than half of people quizzed would be willing to reduce their personal energy consumption, some were wary about sharing their information with third parties.

Many experimental and clinical data have demonstrated that antibiotic-resistance pathogens, such as Escherichia coli (E. coli) and Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus), may play a vital role in priming chronic inflammation. There is thus a great need to develop novel antibacterial materials, and particularly those that are less likely to lead to bacterial resistance.
Now, in a paper appearing recently in Science Bulletin, a team of scientists at the National Center for Nanoscience and Technology, China, led by Guangjun Nie and Yuliang Zhao, has designed and synthesized bio-compatible and biodegradable ε-poly-lysine (EPL)/poly (ε-caprolactone) (PCL) nanoparticles (NPs), which have effective antibacterial activity and no significant cytotoxicity to mammalian cells.

River deltas, low-lying landforms that host critical and diverse ecosystems as well as high concentrations of human population, face an uncertain future. Even as some deltas experience decreased sediment supply from damming, others will see increased sediment discharge from land-use changes. Accurate estimates of the current rate of subsidence in the Mississippi Delta (southern USA) are important for planning wetland restoration and predictions of storm surge flooding.

A team of high school students analyzed data from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) and discovered a never-before-seen pulsar which has the widest orbit of any around a neutron star - one among only a handful of double neutron star systems.
Pulsars are rapidly spinning neutron stars, the superdense remains of massive stars that have exploded as supernovas. As a pulsar spins, lighthouse-like beams of radio waves, streaming from the poles of its powerful magnetic field, sweep through space.
When one of these beams sweeps across the Earth, radio telescopes can capture the pulse of radio waves.

Psychologists have postulated that blaming victims, such as saying 'you were in the wrong place at the wrong time', is a defense mechanism that helps blamers feel the world is still just even when there is evidence it's not.

Therapeutic hypothermia has been successfully used to improve survival chances and reduce the risk of brain injury in adults after cardiac arrest and in newborn infants suffering from lack of oxygen but a large-scale study on the impact of body cooling in infants or children who have had cardiac arrest had not been done.

Automated organization, multi-RAT and multi-layer heterogeneous networks are being listed in mobile of 2020, at least by the kinds of committees that brought us bluetooth 7 years late. It's the 5G era, what vendors say will be the first meaningful unified wideband mobile communication system. 

A new paper suggests a need for a fundamental rethink of the evolutionary path of enzymes, the proteins vital to all life on Earth.
Enzymes catalyze a vast array of biologically relevant chemical reactions even in the simplest living cells but biochemist Dr. Wayne Patrick of University of Otago and colleagues assert that while people tend to imagine evolution as a slow and steady march, from barely functional life forms in the primordial soup towards a modern-day pinnacle of near perfection, that may not be true. 

There is not the slightest doubt that the the universe is real. It is three-dimensional.
But one popular alternative notion has been the "holographic principle", which asserts that a mathematical description of the universe only requires two dimensions. What we perceive as three dimensional may just be the image of two dimensional processes on a huge cosmic horizon. 
Up until now, this speculation has only been mathematically analyzed in exotic spaces with negative curvature. Math, like any language, can talk about lots of things that are not possible and such spaces are quite different from the space in our own universe.
A new paper suggests that the holographic principle even holds in a flat spacetime.

Scientists have developed the first liquid nanoscale laser and it's tunable in real time, meaning you can quickly and simply produce different colors, a unique and useful feature. The laser technology could lead to practical applications, such as a new form of a "lab on a chip" for medical diagnostics.The laser's color can be changed in real time when the liquid dye in the microfluidic channel above the laser's cavity is changed.

The brain function of people addicted to cocaine is different from that of people who are not addicted, and often linked to highly impulsive behavior. The variation in the way that different regions of the brain connect, communicate and function in people addicted to cocaine is an observation published in NeuroImage: Clinical. 
Cocaine addiction exists among an estimated 800,000 people in the U.S. alone, but despite decades of attempts, FDA-approved medications for cocaine use disorder remain to be discovered. 

Researchers have shown that a laser-generated microplasma in air can be used as a source of broadband terahertz radiation.
In a paper published this week in Optica, Fabrizio Buccheri and Xi-Cheng Zhang demonstrate that an approach for generating terahertz waves using intense laser pulses in air - first pioneered in 1993 - can be done with much lower power lasers, a major challenge until now. Ph.D. student and lead author Buccheri explains that they exploited the underlying physics to reduce the necessary laser power for plasma generation. He adds that it could potentially be improved for applications in the monitoring of explosives or drugs.