MIT researchers have developed a robot that enhances the grasping motion of the human hand.
The device, worn around your wrist, works like two extra fingers adjacent to the pinky and thumb.
A novel control algorithm enables it to move in sync with the wearer’s fingers to grasp objects of various shapes and sizes. Wearing the robot, a user could use one hand to hold the… read more
The Chinese city of Yumen in Gansu province in China was sealed off Tuesday for nine days (ending today) after a man died of bubonic plague, South China Post reports, based on a report by China Central Television.
“Other reports said the 38-year-old victim had come across a dead marmot on July 13. He is said to have chopped it up to feed to his dog, but… read more
A new carbon-based material structure developed at MIT generates steam from solar energy.
The structure — a layer of graphite flakes and an underlying carbon foam — is a porous, insulating material structure that floats on water.
When sunlight hits the structure’s surface, it creates a hotspot in the graphite, drawing water up through the material’s pores, where it evaporates as steam. The brighter the light,… read more
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center researchers have developed a noninvasive retinal imaging device that can provide early detection of changes indicating Alzheimer’s disease 15 to 20 years before clinical diagnosis.
“In preliminary results in 40 patients, the test could differentiate between Alzheimer’s disease and non-Alzheimer’s disease with 100 percent sensitivity and 80.6 percent specificity, meaning that all people with the disease tested positive and most of the people without… read more
A kit of 3D-printed anatomical body parts could revolutionize medical education and training, according to its developers at Monash University.
Professor Paul McMenamin, Director of the University’s Centre for Human Anatomy Education, said the simple and cost-effective anatomical kit would dramatically improve trainee doctors’ and other health professionals’ knowledge and could even contribute to the development of new surgical treatments.
“Many medical… read more
In mice with diet-induced diabetes — the equivalent of type 2 diabetes in humans — a single injection of the protein FGF1 is enough to restore blood sugar levels to a healthy range for more than two days. The discovery by Salk Institute scientists, published in the journal Nature, could lead to a new generation of safer, more effective diabetes drugs.
The team found that… read more
Researchers at Rice University’s Laboratory for Nanophotonics (LANP) have created a unique sensor that amplifies the optical signature of molecules by about 100 billion times — accurately identifying the composition and structure of individual molecules containing fewer than 20 atoms.
The new single-molecule imaging method, described in the journal Nature Communications, uses a form of Raman spectroscopy in combination with optical amplifier, making the sensor… read more
Researchers at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics are working to bring the multiverse hypothesis — we are living in one universe of many — into the realm of testable science.
Perimeter Associate Faculty member Matthew Johnson and his team are looking for clues for the existence of multiverses (a.ka. parallel universes) in the cosmic microwave background data, assumed to be left over from… read more
MIT researchers discovered last year that when water droplets spontaneously jump away from superhydrophobic (water-repelling) surfaces during condensation, the droplets can gain electric charge in the process.
Now the same team has demonstrated that this process can generate small amounts of electricity, which could lead to devices that can charge cellphones or other electronics using just the humidity in the air. As a side benefit, the system… read more
An unusual three-dimensional porous nanostructure called pillared boron nitride (PBN) could achieve a balance of strength, toughness, and ability to transfer heat that could benefit nanoelectronics, gas storage, and composite materials that perform multiple functions, Rice University engineers have discovered.
Their findings were published online July 14 in the Journal of Physical Chemistry C.
The 3-D prototypes they made (using computer simulations) fuse one-dimensional boron nitride… read more
University of Basel physicists with teams from Finland and Japan were able to place 20 single bromine atoms on a fully insulated surface at room temperature to form the smallest “Swiss cross,” taking a step towards next-generation atomic-scale storage devices.
Nature Communications has published their results.
Ever since the 1990s, physicists have been able to directly control surface structures by moving and positioning single atoms to… read more
Weizmann Institute scientists have demonstrated the first photonic router — a quantum device based on a single atom that enables routing of single photons, a step toward overcoming the difficulties in building quantum computers.
A photonic switch
At the core of the device is an atom that can switch between two states. The state is set just by sending a single particle of light — or… read more
An Intel-Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (Berkeley Lab) collaboration has found a new way to create smaller features for future generations of microprocessors by modifying the chemistry of photoresists, which are used to generate the patterns on a chip.
The researchers believe their results could be easily incorporated by companies that make resist, and could be incorporated into manufacturing lines as early as 2017.
The… read more
A new discovery will make it possible to create pixels just a few hundred nanometers across that could pave the way for extremely high-resolution and low-energy thin, flexible displays for applications such as smart glasses, synthetic retinas, and foldable screens.
A team led by Oxford University scientists found that by sandwiching a seven-nanometer-thick layer of a phase-change material called GST between two layers of a transparent electrode,… read more
Microsoft Research introduced “Project Adam” AI machine-learning object recognition software at its 2014 Microsoft Research Faculty Summit.
The goal of Project Adam is to enable software to visually recognize any object — an ambitious project, given the immense neural network in human brains that makes those kinds of associations possible through trillions of connections.
Project Adam generated a massive dataset of 14 million images from the Web… read more