Button pressing and solar energy power the retro gaming device. Researchers develop first-ever battery-free, energy-harvesting, interactive device. And it looks and feels like a retro 8-bit Nintendo Game Boy. It’s a powerful proof-of-concept, developed by researchers at Northwestern University and the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in the Netherlands, that pushes the boundaries of battery-free intermittent computing into the realm of fun and interaction.

Instead of batteries, which are costly, environmentally hazardous and ultimately end up in landfills, this device harvests energy from...

To the surprise of many planetary scientists, the oxidized iron mineral hematite has been discovered at high latitudes on the Moon, according to a study published today in Science Advances led by Shuai Li, assistant researcher at the Hawai’i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology (HIGP) in the UH Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST).

Iron is highly reactive with oxygen – forming reddish rust commonly seen on Earth. The lunar surface and interior, however, are virtually devoid of oxygen, so pristine metallic iron is prevalent on the Moon and highly oxidized iron has not been confirmed in samples returned from the Apollo missions...

A team led by a biomedical scientist at the University of California, Riverside has found a new mechanism responsible for the abnormal development of neuronal connections in the mouse brain that leads to seizures and abnormal social behaviors.

The researchers focused on the hippocampus, which plays an important role in learning and social interactions; and synapses, specialized contacts between neurons.

Each neuron in the brain receives numerous excitatory and inhibitory synaptic inputs...

In 2018, one-half of the Nobel Prize was awarded to Arthur Ashkin, the physicist who developed optical tweezers, the use of a tightly focused laser beam to isolate and move micron-scale objects (the size of red blood cells). Now Justus Ndukaife, assistant professor of electrical engineering at Vanderbilt University, has developed the first-ever opto-thermo-electrohydrodynamic tweezers, optical nanotweezers that can trap and manipulate objects on an even smaller scale.

The article, “Stand-off trapping and manipulation of sub-10 nm objects and biomolecules using opto-thermo-electrohydrodynamic tweezers” was published online in the journal Nature Nanotechnology on August 31.

The article was authored by Ndukaife and graduate students Chuchuan Hong and Se...