New research from Binghamton University, State University of New York, could make it easier to track and process suspicious activity in surveillance footage.
Wood may seem more at home in log cabins than modern architecture, but a specially treated type of timber could be tomorrow’s trendy building material. Today, scientists report a new kind of transparent wood that not only transmits light, but also absorbs and releases heat, potentially saving on energy costs.
Science-fiction writers have long envisioned human–machine hybrids that wield extraordinary powers. However, “super plants” with integrated nanomaterials may be much closer to reality than cyborgs.
At USC, researchers have published a new study that tackles a long-standing problem for autonomous vehicle developers: testing the system’s perception algorithms, which allow the car to “understand” what it “sees.”
From computer hard discs and smart phones to earbuds and electric motors, magnets are at the forefront of today’s technology. Magnets containing rare-earth elements are among the most powerful available, allowing many everyday objects to be ever smaller.
Just as controlled-release medications slowly dole out their cargo after they experience a pH change in the body, implanted “artificial muscles” could someday flex and relax in response to light illuminating the skin. In pilot studies, scientists have developed a new material that expands and contracts.
Traditional surgery to reshape a nose or ear entails cutting, sometimes followed by long recovery times and scars. Now, researchers have developed a “molecular surgery” process using tiny needles, electric current and 3D molds to reshape living tissue with no incisions, scarring or recovery time.
Nature has evolved protein-based substances with mechanical properties that rival even the best synthetic materials. Pound for pound, spider silk is stronger and tougher than steel. But unlike steel, the natural fiber cannot be mass-produced.
When an act of terrorism or a vehicle or industrial accident ignites fuel, the resulting fire or explosion can be devastating. Today, scientists will describe how lengthy but microscopic chains of polymers could be added to fuel to significantly reduce the damage from these terrifying incidents without impacting performance.
Hundreds of everyday items contain organophosphate ester (OPE) flame retardants and plasticizers. Some of these compounds make their way into the air, onto surfaces and even inside our bodies, with uncertain health effects.
ORNL used artificial intelligence to analyze data about bullying to reveal potential of broader impacts; flexible sensor wraps around power cables to monitor electrical loads from household appliances; ORNL is evaluating paths for licensing remotely operated microreactors; ORNL used carbon nanotubes to improve process that removes salt from water
Drawing inspiration from nature, researchers are making polymers with ever-more precise compositions on demand. Using multistep synthesis tools pulled from biology, a group is reporting that it is developing ultra-high precision synthetic polymers with precisely controlled chain lengths.
Prehistoric rock paintings are a source of fascination. Aside from their beauty, there’s deep meaning in these strokes, which depict ancient rituals and important symbols. Scientists now describe use of “X-ray vision” to gain brand-new insights about the layers of paint in rock art without needless damage.
If you’ve ever dreamed about getting a good night’s sleep, your answer may someday lie in data generated by your sleepwear. Researchers have developed pajamas embedded with self-powered sensors that provide unobtrusive and continuous monitoring of heartbeat, breathing and sleep posture.
There’s nothing like a glass of orange juice, but prices have soared as the Florida citrus industry fights a citrus greening disease epidemic that's been drying out oranges and reducing crop yield. There’s no cure, but researchers report they have identified a fungal compound that may inhibit the bacteria.
Freshly distilled, un-aged whiskey is filtered over charcoal made from the sugar maple tree in a mysterious, but necessary step known as the Lincoln County Process. By law, a product cannot be called Tennessee whiskey without it. Researchers have clues as to what the process imparts to the final product.
Aiming a laser beam at an aircraft isn’t a harmless prank: The sudden flash of bright light can incapacitate the pilot, risking the lives of passengers and crew. Today, researchers report liquid crystals that could someday be incorporated into aircraft windshields to diffuse any wavelength of laser light.
Leading ocean science and engineering institutions are joining forces to create Ocean Visions, an innovative scientist-driven ocean conservation venture that fosters collaboration between top researchers, conservationists and entrepreneurs committed to solving some of the biggest challenges facing ocean health.
Research explores soil, fungi, phosphorus dynamics
Globus, the leading research data management service, today announced the lineup of speakers for its eighth annual user conference, GlobusWorld 2019, held this year on May 1-2, 2019 in Chicago, IL.
About 2.5 billion gallons of produced water, a byproduct from the oil refinery and extraction process, is generated each day in the United States.
Information on the 2019 American Physical Society April Meeting in Denver, which explores research from “Quarks to Cosmos.” It runs from Saturday, April 13 through Tuesday, April 16 at the Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel. At the meeting, the latest breaking research in particle and astrophysics will be presented -- from long views of massive, ancient objects in the universe to short-lived, subatomic interactions. The meeting will also feature thoughtful presentations by experts in education, policy, the history of physics, and many other areas.
Astronomers using the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) have found a pulsar speeding away from its presumed birthplace at nearly 700 miles per second, with its trail pointing directly back at the center of a shell of debris from the supernova explosion that created it. The discovery is providing important insights into how pulsars — superdense neutron stars left over after a massive star explodes — can get a “kick” of speed from the explosion.
EB 2019, to be held April 6–9 at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, is the annual meeting of five scientific societies, bringing together more than 12,000 scientists and 25 guest societies in one interdisciplinary community.
UW researchers have developed a robotic system that can feed people who need someone to help them eat.
Researchers have created tiny functional, remote-powered, walking robots, developing a multistep nanofabrication technique that turns a 4-inch specialized silicon wafer into a million microscopic robots in just weeks. Each one of a robot’s four legs is just under 100-atoms-thick, but powered by laser light hitting the robots’ solar panels, they propel the tiny robots. The researchers are now working on smart versions of the robots that could potentially make incredible journeys in the human body.
Mathematician Shankar Venkataramani’s research group recently discovered a lot of new, powerful geometries involved in frilly surfaces, which he will describe at the 2019 APS March Meeting. For mathematicians, frilly is plain language for an inflected nonsmooth surface -- one that changes the direction in which it bends, such as with kale or coral. Venkataramani’s group developed the mathematics to describe these surfaces, and the combination of new geometry insights and age-old slugs might just be the right combination for a new generation of flexible, energy-efficient soft-bodied robots.
A new APS report, “The Impact of Industrial Physics on the U.S. Economy,” shows the significant role of physics, which contributed an estimated $2.3 trillion (12.6 percent of U.S. GDP) in 2016 alone. Industrial physics encompasses the application of physics knowledge and principles to the design and manufacture of products and services. Many people working within this field have job titles other than physicist, so this report includes all aspects of industrial physics contributions.
The Treatment Plenary at the International Conference on Eating Disorders to address the evidence for short-term treatments for eating disorders
The latest data from the giant planets has sent researchers back to the drawing board. Cassini orbited Saturn for 13 years before its dramatic final dive into the planet’s interior, while Juno has been orbiting Jupiter for two and a half years; the data collected has been “invaluable but also confounding,” said David Stevenson from Caltech, who will present an update of both missions at the 2019 APS March Meeting in Boston. Innovative design that protected the instruments from fierce radiation and powered the mission on solar energy alone has reaped plenty of surprises.
Solar cells offer a clean source of energy, but the efficiency of a fixed solar system is limited: The sun moves, but solar cells do not. Beth Parks has devised an astonishingly simple way to overcome this limitation -- a bucket of water. As she will describe at the 2019 APS March Meeting, she developed a frame that holds the solar cell with a bucket suspended on either end. By controlling the leak of water from one of the buckets, the solar cell shifts, tracking the arc of the sun throughout the day.
Knitting may be an ancient manufacturing method, but Elisabetta Matsumoto believes that understanding how different stitch types determine shape and mechanical strength will be invaluable for designing materials for future technologies, and a more detailed understanding of the knitting “code” could benefit manufacturers around the world. Members of the Matsumoto group are delving through the surprisingly complex mathematics that underlies tangles of yarn -- work Matsumoto will describe at the 2019 APS March Meeting.
An ultra-low power hybrid chip inspired by the brain could help give palm-sized robots the ability to collaborate and learn from their experiences.
Humans have a knack for finding patterns in the world around them. Researchers are building a model that shows how this ability might work, which they will describe at the 2019 APS March Meeting. The brain does more than just process incoming information, the researchers say. It constantly tries to predict what’s coming next. The new model attempts to explain how people can make such predictions.
Engineers are developing an educational toolkit to bring integrated photonics into the college engineering and science curriculum. The kit is designed to teach students practical skills in integrated photonics and equip them to meet the growing demand for technicians and engineers in the industry.
A new frontier in the study of magnetic materials, femtomagnetism, could lead to ultrafast magnetic storage devices that would transform information processing technologies. Now, researchers report a tabletop method to characterize such a faster magnetic storage using high-harmonic generation of laser light in iron thin films. Their work, which Guoping Zhang will present at the 2019 APS March Meeting, has the same vision as quantum technology.
Princeton researchers are exploring how cooperation arises in human societies, where people tend to cluster into various group types -- political, religious, familial, professional, etc. -- which they will describe at the 2019 APS March Meeting. Within such groups, people can cooperate or “defect” and receive payoffs based on those exchanges. Cooperation, they observed, is most favored when allowing for the existence of “loners” -- people who are temporarily not members of any group.
Researchers have analyzed the real-time effect of a large-scale hack on automobiles in a major urban environment. Using percolation theory, they analyzed how a large, disseminated hack on automobiles would affect traffic flow in New York City, and they found that it could create citywide gridlock. However, based on these findings the team also developed a risk-mitigation strategy to prevent mass urban disruption -- work they will describe at the 2019 APS March Meeting.
Theory suggests that metallic hydrogen should be a superconductor at room temperature; however, this material has yet to be produced in the lab. Metal superhydrides are packed with hydrogen atoms in a configuration similar to the structure of metallic hydrogen. Models predict they should behave similarly. Samples of superhydrides of lanthanum have been made and tested, and at the 2019 APS March Meeting in Boston, Russell Hemley will describe his group’s work studying the material.
Because cracks propagate quickly, studying the fracturing process -- which can tell us a lot about the materials and the physics involved -- currently requires expensive high-speed cameras. A new imaging method known as the virtual frame technique allows ordinary digital cameras to capture millions of frames per second for several seconds, requiring only a short and intense pulse of light. At the 2019 APS March Meeting, researchers will describe how the virtual frame technique would allow direct imaging of fracturing and other material surface processes.
Medical practitioners commonly treat organs in isolation, but Boston University physicist Plamen Ivanov wants to usher in a new paradigm. As he will describe at the 2019 APS March Meeting, “It’s time to view health and disease not only from the perspective of individual organs but from the point of view of their integration,” he said. “We need to show how the different systems communicate with each other and stay in sync.” Ivanov calls the field he’s pioneering “network physiology.”
ICED Sociocultural Plenary to address eating disorders in the LGBTQ+ community
To investigate how shortfin mako sharks achieve their impressive speeds, researchers tested real sharkskin samples, using digital particle image velocimetry. They discovered that a “passive bristling” capability of the microscopic surface geometry of the shark’s scales controlled flow separation, which causes pressure drag -- the most influential cause of drag on aircraft. The work will be described at the 2019 APS March Meeting, and could lead to new designs to reduce drag on aircraft.
For best chances of in vitro fertilization success, the most motile sperm are chosen from semen. But current methods of sperm selection are inefficient and can cause fragmentation of the precious DNA carried in sperm heads. Afrouz Ataei has developed an alternative mechanism to sort sperm, which avoids genetic damage while also being faster and more cost-effective. Ataei will describe the device at the 2019 APS March Meeting in Boston.
Side channel signals and bolts of lightning from distant storms could one day help prevent hackers from sabotaging electric power substations and other critical infrastructure, a new study suggests.
Researchers at Yale University gain insights into the mechanics of touch by studying the sensitive skin on ducks’ bills, which they found is similar in some ways to the skin on human palms.
Researchers at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory are developing techniques to study how proteins respond to the tiny forces our cells experience.
Researchers at Imperial College London created a bioreactor to allow heart tissue to experience mechanical forces in sync with the beats, like it would in the body, to study the mechanics of healthy and diseased hearts.
Formal study release held in conjunction with an information session with the study authors at the TMS 2019 Annual Meeting & Exhibition in San Antonio, Texas.
Researchers at Rockefeller University characterized a molecular spring attached to the membrane of inner ear cells that converts bending forces created by a sound wave to electrical signals that the brain can interpret.
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