Month: December 2019

Leading a double life as both solids and liquids, liquid crystals occupy center stage for creating smaller, faster and more efficient technologies. Even at the level of single particles, liquid crystals can bend light and react to external forces, like electric fields or physical pushes and pulls. And so, a tiny quantity of liquid crystals

IMAGE: Different views of the 3D-?printed miniature David (1 mm high) made of pure copper. view more  Credit: Giorgio Ercolano, Exaddon There he is, standing upon his pedestal: David by Michelangelo. A world-?famous statue that nearly every child can recognise. But this David is just 1 millimeter tall, pedestal included, and is made not of marble

IMAGE: Ali Abolmaali, view more  Credit: The University of Texas at Arlington The University of Texas at Arlington and the city of Waxahachie are collaborating on robotic inspections of several miles of the city’s sewer pipelines. Ali Abolmaali, professor and chair of UTA’s Civil Engineering Department, will lead the pilot project, which will lead to estimates

Imagine swarms of robotic insects moving around us as they perform various tasks. It might sound like science fiction, but it’s actually more plausible than you might think. Researchers at EPFL’s School of Engineering have developed a soft robotic insect, propelled at 3 cm per second by artificial muscles. The team developed two versions of

IMAGE: The TEM image shows the superstructure which is created by doping of Bi2Te3 with manganese: Between the originally 5-atom-layer thick units (QL) new 7-atom-layer units are formed by self-organization in… view more  Credit: G. Springholz/Uni Linz New effects in solid-state physics are often first discovered at temperatures near absolute zero (0 Kelvin or -273 °C).

A lot can happen in a year, especially when it comes to science. As 2019 draws to a close, Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society, is highlighting the year’s biggest stories in chemistry, top research trends and important developments in a special issue. In addition, the magazine makes

Associate Professor Menglin Chen has received a major grant from the Carlsberg Foundation to develop a completely new method of regenerating brain and heart cells. The method uses water-based nanofibers coated with organic photovoltaic nanomaterials to create light controlled neural stimulating scaffolds inside the body. With a grant from the Carlsberg Foundation of DKK 4.2

IMAGE: Qijun Zhang, a PhD student in the UTIA Department of Forestry, Wildlife and Fisheries, has placed first in an international student poster competition hosted by the Society of Wood Science… view more  Credit: Photo by K. Keel-Blackmon, courtesy UTIA. KNOXVILLE, Tenn. – Qijun Zhang, a graduate student studying at the University of Tennessee Center for Renewable

IMAGE: Woman receiving a diagnostic medical scan for head and neck cancer. view more  Credit: Mark_Kostich Shutterstock Although less often the focus of cancer research, recent studies have hinted at the possible importance of a type of protein known as nuclear transport receptors. Now researchers at Kanazawa University and collaborating institutions in Japan and the US

IMAGE: A sheathless acoustic fluorescence activated cell sorting (aFACS) system for isolating fragile biological cells with high cell purity and viability view more  Credit: SUTD Fluorescence activated cell sorting (FACS) is a modern cell analysis technique for quantitative detection of physiological, biochemical, immunological, and molecular biological traits of cells – it can further separate a specific

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Scientists have developed a new gene-therapy technique by transforming human cells into mass producers of tiny nano-sized particles full of genetic material that has the potential to reverse disease processes. Though the research was intended as a proof of concept, the experimental therapy slowed tumor growth and prolonged survival in mice with

Polymers are used to develop various materials, such as plastics, nylons, and rubbers. In their most basic form, they are made up of many of identical molecules joined together over and over, like a chain. If you engineer molecules to join together in specific ways, you can control the characteristics of the resulting polymer. Using

Artificial Intelligence may be just the thing to accelerate spray-on solar cell technology, which could revolutionize how consumers use energy. A research team at the University of Central Florida used Machine Learning, aka Artificial Intelligence to optimize the materials used to make perovskite solar cells (PSC). The Organic-Inorganic halide perovskites material used in PSC converts