The site of Apple’s proposed new spaceship-shaped headquarters that goes before the City Council Tuesday for an initial vote “will be one of the most environmentally sustainable developments on this scale anywhere in the world,” according ot Dan Whisenhunt, San Jose Mercury News reports.
Apple Campus 2 promises to bring a world-class real-estate project — along with a lot of traffic congestion — to the heart of… read more
Astrophysicists have found the first evidence of a water-rich rocky planetary body outside our solar system in its shattered remains orbiting a white dwarf.
A new study by scientists at the Universities of Warwick and Cambridge analyzed the dust and debris surrounding the white dwarf star GD61 170 light years away.
Using observations obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope and the large telescopes of… read more
Researchers at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) Institute for Silicon Photovoltaics have shown that graphene retains its impressive set of properties when it is coated with a thin silicon film.
These findings may allow for entirely new possibilities to use graphene in thin-film photovoltaics.
Graphene has extreme conductivity and is completely transparent while being inexpensive and nontoxic. This would makes it a perfect candidate material… read more
Under certain conditions, putting a cracked piece of metal under tension — that is, exerting a force that would be expected to pull it apart — has the reverse effect, causing the crack to close and its edges to fuse together, MIT researchers have discovered.
The surprising finding could lead to self-healing materials that repair incipient damage before it has a chance to spread.
The… read more
Research has shown that exercise is good for the brain. Now investigators have identified a molecule called irisin that is produced in the brain during endurance exercise and has neuroprotective effects.
Researchers were able to artificially increase the levels of irisin in the blood to activate genes involved in learning and memory. The findings may be useful for designing drugs that use this exercise-induced molecule to guard… read more
A new microscopic technique that can see tiny structures inside the “control center” of the cell for the first time has been developed by researchers at Queen Mary University of London,
It represents a major advance for cell biologists because it will allow them to investigate structures deep inside the cell, such as viruses, bacteria, and parts of the nucleus in depth.
Recent advances in… read more
The European INFERNOS (Information, fluctuations, and energy control in small systems) project aims to realize experimentally Maxwell’s Demon* by developing electronic and biomolecular nanodevices that support this principle.
Project partners met earlier this week at the Faculty of Physics of the University of Barcelona. The project is centered on considering information as a thermodynamic parameter.
Its ideas may be applied to different… read more
An international team of astronomers has discovered an exotic young planet that is not orbiting a star. This free-floating planet, dubbed PSO J318.5-22, is just 80 light-years away from Earth and has a mass only six times that of Jupiter. The planet formed a mere 12 million years ago — -a newborn in planet lifetimes.
It was identified from its faint and unique heat signature by the … read more
Rice U. theorists calculate atom-thick carbyne chains may be the strongest material ever, if and when anyone can make it in bulk.
Carbyne is a chain of carbon atoms held together by either double or alternating single and triple atomic bonds. That makes it a true one-dimensional material, unlike atom-thin sheets of graphene, which have a top and a bottom, or hollow nanotubes, which … read more
Researchers are developing a system that uses tiny magnetic beads to quickly detect rare types of cancer cells circulating in a patient’s blood, an advance that could help medical doctors diagnose cancer earlier than now possible and monitor how well a patient is responding to therapy.
While other researchers have used magnetic beads for similar applications, the new “high-throughput” system has the ability to quickly process and… read more
By caging bacteria in microscopic houses, scientists at The University of Texas at Austin are studying how communities of bacteria, such as those found in the human gut and lungs, interact and develop infections.
In a recent experiment, they demonstrated that a community of Staphylococcus aureus, which can cause some skin infections, became more resistant to antibiotics when it was contained within a larger community of Pseudomonas… read more
Computer scientists at Saarland University in Germany and the MIT Media Lab have developed a printable multitouch sensor film that you can cut to any desired shape.
Electronic-ink wires are printed (using conductive inkjet printing) on flexible, thin film in one of two configurations.
Star topology has the controller in the center (supports basic forms like triangles, rectangles,… read more
The successful synthesis of the first superconductor designed entirely on a computer has been achieved by Binghamton University assistant professor of physics Aleksey Kolmogorov and his international colleagues.
The synthesized material — a novel iron tetraboride compound — has a novel crystal structure and exhibits an unexpected type of superconductivity for a material that contains iron, as predicted in the original computational study.
“Paradigm-shifting superconducting materials have… read more
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2013 was awarded jointly to Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel “for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems.”
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Disney Research Pittsburgh have devised a motion tracking technology that could eliminate much of the annoying lag that occurs in existing video game systems that use motion tracking, while also being extremely precise and highly affordable.
Called Lumitrack, the technology has two components — projectors and sensors. A structured pattern, which looks something like a very large barcode, is… read more