Being able to measure, and monitor, temperatures and temperature changes at miniscule scales—inside a cell or in micro and nano-electronic components—has the potential to impact many areas of research from disease detection to a major challenge of modern computation and communication technologies, how to measure scalability and performance in electronic components.

A collaborative team, led by scientists from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), developed a highly-sensitive nano-thermometer that uses atom-like inclusions in diamond nanoparticles to accurately measure temperature at the nanoscale...

Researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HU) have found a way to transform skin cells into the 3 major stem cell types that comprise early-stage embryos. The work (in mouse cells) has significant implications for modelling embryonic disease and placental dysfunctions, as well as paving the way to create whole embryos from skin cells.

As published in Cell Stem Cell, Dr. Yossi Buganim of HU’s Department of Developmental Biology and Cancer Research and his team discovered a set of genes capable of transforming murine skin cells into all three of the cell types that comprise the early embryo: the embryo itself, the placenta and the extra-embryonic tissues, such as the umbilical cord...

Nanopillars shape light precisely for practical applications...

Up to half of Earth’s ocean water may have come from impacts by asteroids. Two cosmochemists at Arizona State University have made the first-ever measurements of water contained in samples from the surface of an asteroid. The samples came from asteroid Itokawa and were collected by the Japanese space probe Hayabusa.

The team’s findings suggest that impacts early in Earth’s history by similar asteroids could have delivered as much as half of our planet’s ocean water.

“We found the samples we examined were enriched in water compared to the average for inner solar system objects,” says Ziliang J...