University of Akron researchers have developed nanoscale “giant surfactants” (using nanopatterning to combine functioning molecular nanoparticles with polymer surface films and liquid solutions) that could lead to smaller chips, lighter laptops, slimmer televisions, and crisper smartphone visual displays.
Surfactants are compounds that lower the surface tension (or interfacial tension) between two liquids or between a liquid and a solid.
The giant surfactants developed at… read more
A prominent hacker who discovered a way to have ATMs spit out cash and was set to deliver a talk about hacking pacemakers and other wireless implantable medical devices has died in San Francisco, authorities and his employer said, San Jose Mercury News reports.
Barnaby Jack died at his home in San Francisco Thursday, although the cause of death is still under investigation, San Francisco Deputy Coroner… read more
The phenomenon of false memory has been well-documented: In many court cases, defendants have been found guilty based on testimony from witnesses and victims who were sure of their recollections, but DNA evidence later overturned the conviction.
In a step toward understanding how these faulty memories arise, MIT neuroscientists have shown that they can plant false memories in the brains of mice.
They also… read more
Scientists have know that something in space accelerated particles in the Van Allen radiation belts to more than 99 percent the speed of light, but they didn’t know what that something was.
New results from NASA‘s Van Allen Probes now show that the acceleration energy comes from within the belts themselves.
Particles inside the belts are sped up by local kicks of… read more
Quantum entanglement works for photons, and even molecuiles, but what about larger objects?
University of Geneva (UNIGE) researchers managed to entangle crystals in 2011, but now they have entangled two optic fibers, populated by 500 photons.
To do this, the team first created an entanglement between two fiber optics on a microscopic level before moving it to the macroscopic level. The entangled state survived… read more
Earlier this year, MIT researchers developed a way to easily and efficiently edit the genomes of living cells. Now, the researchers have discovered key factors that influence the accuracy of the system, an important step toward making it safer for potential use in humans, says Feng Zhang, leader of the research team.
With this technology, scientists can deliver or disrupt multiple genes at… read more
The information carried by the electrical activity of neurons is a mixture of stored memories, environmental circumstances, and current state of mind, scientists have found in a study of laboratory rats.
The findings, which appear in the open-access journal PLoS Biology, offer new insights into the neurobiological processes that give rise to knowledge and memory recall.
Recent research showed that memories are not unchanging… read more
University of California San Diego neuroengineers have developed a real-time electrochemical biosensor that can alert marathoners, competitive bikers, and other “extreme” athletes that they’re about to “bonk,” or “hit the wall.”
The sensor can be applied to the human skin like a temporary tattoo that stays on and flexes with body movements.
In ACS’ journal Analytical Chemistry, Joseph Wang and colleagues describe the first… read more
NASA engineers at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., have put rocket engine parts to the test and compared their performance to parts made the old-fashioned way with welds and multiple parts during planned subscale acoustic tests for the Space Launch System (SLS) heavy-lift rocket.
In little more than a month, Marshall engineers built two subscale injectors with a specialized 3-D… read more
Researchers from King’s College London Institute of Psychiatry, in collaboration with Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL) and the University of Barcelona, have mapped the neural pathways involved in word learning among humans.
They found that the arcuate fasciculus, a collection of nerve fibers connecting auditory regions at the temporal lobe with the motor area located at the frontal lobe in the left hemisphere… read more
Salk Institute researchers have demonstrated that altering the functional architecture of the brain’s cortex is possible, and that this alteration produces significant changes in parts of the brain that connect with the cortex and define its functional properties.
Dennis O’Leary, holder of the Vincent J. Coates Chair of Molecular Neurobiology at Salk, was the first scientist to show that the basic functional architecture of the… read more
Oxytocin has long been known as the warm, fuzzy hormone that promotes feelings of love, social bonding and well-being. It’s even being tested as an anti-anxiety drug.
But new Northwestern Medicine research shows oxytocin also can cause emotional pain, an entirely new, darker identity for the hormone.
Oxytocin appears to be the reason stressful social situations, perhaps being bullied at school or tormented by a boss,… read more
Researchers from Carnegie Mellon and Microsoft Research have proposed a new method for the large-scale collection and analysis of drawings by using a mobile game specifically designed to collect such data.
Analyzing this crowdsourced drawing database, the researchers build a spatially varying model of artistic consensus at the stroke level. They then present a surprisingly simple stroke-correction method which uses their artistic consensus… read more
Scientists at Imperial College London have designed a concept mission to land astronauts on Mars. The plan envisages a three-person crew journeying to Mars aboard a small two-part craft, BBC News reports.
The craft would rotate to generate artificial gravity and use a heat shield to protect itself against solar flares. The crew would then return to Martian orbit in a pre-sent craft fuelled using ice from… read more
Leap Motion’s low-cost gesture-control device is not as easy to use as you might think.
For the past couple days, I’ve been gesticulating even more than normal — at times, subtly, at other times, wildly — while getting to know the latest in gesture-control technology: the Leap Motion controller, Rachel Metz writes at MIT Technology Review.
Long anticipated due to its low cost ($80),… read more