Hot Recent Science & Technology Articles (28)

Posted: 8/7/2016

1. Nanocones Boost Efficiency of Solar-based Water Splitting (Hydrogen power is coming!)
2. Molecular net goes viral (This could be a breakthrough! “However, viruses break down easily when removed from a liquid environment, which hinders their analysis by atomic force microscopy, electron microscopy and mass spectrometry. … constructed a tannic acid and iron(III) molecular net around a single brome mosaic virus particle, stabilising it in non-liquid conditions. The biocompatible net coats the virus with a molecular layer thin enough to follow the underlying morphology, yet still providing a barrier to water. The research team could place the coated virus in air or under vacuum long enough to take measurements and further probe its structure.”)
3. Junk DNA’ tells mice—and snakes—how to grow a backbone (“The research team traced the extra ribs to a mutation deactivating a gene called GDF11, which puts the brakes on another gene that helps stem cells retain their ability to morph into many cell types. Without GDF11 to slow down that second gene - OCT4 - the mice grew extra vertebrae and ribs.”)
4. Scientists find new antibiotic right under our noses (This could be big!)
5. Engineers discover highly conductive materials for more efficient electronics (This could be big! “that when two oxide compounds—strontium titanate (STO) and neodymium titanate (NTO)—interact with each other, the bonds between the atoms are arranged in a way that produces many free electrons, the particles that can carry electrical current. STO and NTO are by themselves known as insulators … But when they interface, the amount of electrons produced is a hundred times larger than what is possible in semiconductors. … could greatly improve power transistors”)
6. Static electricity strengthens desert dust storms
7. Ancient "Poop Sticks" Offer Clues to the Spread of Disease Along the Silk Road  The parasites found within the 2,000-year-old-feces smeared on bamboo suggest more than commodities made the trip
8. The Map of the Human Brain Is Finally Getting More Useful  Human Connectome Project neuroscientists have created a program to make individualized brain maps.
   Human Brain Mapped in Unprecedented Detail Nearly 100 previously unidentified brain areas revealed by examination of the cerebral cortex  (“Some neuroscientists still define brain regions based on a historical map called Brodmann’s areas that was published in 1909. That map divided each half of the brain into 52 regions. Each hemisphere on the new map has 180 regions.”)
9. New Way to Boost Crop Production Doesn’t Rely on GMOs or Pesticides  Researchers are fiddling with the plant equivalent of gut bacteria. (“The microbiome—the communities of bacteria and fungi that live in the soil around the roots, on the surface of the plant, and inside the plant tissue—contributes to a plant’s health and growth. The idea is that by isolating these good bacteria and fungi and then adding them back into the plant, they could stimulate more growth and make crops healthier.”)
10. Soil ‘booster shots’ could turn barren lands green
11. Scientists link bipolar disorder to unexpected brain region
12. Plants can gamble, according to study
13. From super to ultra-resolution microscopy. A new method pushes the frontier in imaging resolution, with the potential to distinguish individual features in single molecules
14. New Life Found That Lives Off Electricity Scientists have figured out how microbes can suck energy from rocks. Such life-forms might be more widespread than anyone anticipated.
15. Antisocial cave fish may hold clues to schizophrenia, autism (Fascinating!)
16. Researcher develops new, non-invasive method to wipe out cancerous tumors (This could be big, if confirmed! It also sounds like this new treatment is easily repeatable! “... injecting a chemical compound, nitrobenzaldehyde, into the tumor and allowing it to diffuse into the tissue. He then aims a beam of light at the tissue, causing the cells to become very acidic inside and, essentially, commit suicide. Within two hours, … estimates up to 95 percent of the targeted cancer cells are dead.”)
17. New electron microscope method detects atomic-scale magnetism (Wow! “Instead of fully eliminating the aberrations in the electron microscope, the researchers purposely added a type of aberration, called four-fold astigmatism, to collect atomic level magnetic signals from a lanthanum manganese arsenic oxide material.”)
18. What did Earth's ancient magnetic field look like? (“... that around 1 billion years ago, Earth could have transitioned from a ... [dipole], ...  to having a "weak" magnetic field that fluctuated wildly in terms of intensity and direction and originated from several poles. Then, shortly after the predicted timing of the core solidification event, … dynamo simulations predict that Earth's magnetic field transitioned back to a "strong," two-pole one. "These findings could offer an explanation for the bizarre fluctuations in magnetic field direction seen in the geologic record around 600 to 700 million years ago”)
19. New chip design makes parallel programs run many times faster and requires one-tenth the code (Great, more hardware support for software developers! “So computer scientists have developed a host of application-specific techniques for prioritizing graph exploration. … What distinguishes Swarm from other multicore chips is that it has extra circuitry for handling that type of prioritization. It time-stamps tasks according to their priorities and begins working on the highest-priority tasks in parallel. Higher-priority tasks may engender their own lower-priority tasks, but Swarm slots those into its queue of tasks automatically. The Swarm chip has extra circuitry to store and manage its queue of tasks. It also has a circuit that records the memory addresses of all the data its cores are currently working on. That circuit implements something called a Bloom filter, which crams data into a fixed allotment of space and answers yes/no questions about its contents. … The Bloom filter is one of several circuits that help Swarm identify memory access conflicts. … that time-stamping makes synchronization between cores easier to enforce. For instance, each data item is labeled with the timestamp of the last task that updated it, so tasks with later time-stamps know they can read that data without bothering to determine who else is using it.”)