Recent Comments

    Researchers Engineer a Tougher Fiber

    February 24, 2019, Categories  Physics, Technology/Electronics, Chemistry/Nanotechnology

    NC State University researchers created fibers consisting of a gallium metal core surrounded by an elastic polymer sheath. When placed under stress, the fiber has the strength of the metal core. But when the metal breaks, the fiber doesn’t fail – the polymer sheath absorbs the strain between the breaks in the metal and transfers the stress back to the metal core.
    Credit: Michael Dickey, NC State University

    North Carolina State University researchers have developed a fiber that combines the elasticity of rubber with the strength of a metal, resulting in a tougher material that could be incorporated into soft robotics, packaging materials or next-generation textiles.

    “A good way of explaining the material is to think of rubber bands and metal wires,” says Michael Dickey, correspondin...

    Read More

    Gene Therapy durably Reverse Congenital Deafness in mice

    February 24, 2019, Categories  Health/Medical, Biology/Biotechnology

    The left panel is a schematic representation of the human ear. Sound waves are collected by the outer ear made up of the pinna and ear canal. The middle ear, composed of the eardrum and ossicles, transmits sound waves to the inner ear, which features the cochlea – the hearing organ responsible for transmitting auditory messages to the central nervous system. The right panel shows an immunofluorescence image of the auditory sensory epithelium within an injected cochlea. The inner hair cells have been stained for otoferlin in green. Otoferlin is detected in almost all of these cells. The inset is a high magnification area showing an inner hair cell that has not been transduced.
    Credit: © Institut Pasteur

    In collaboration with the universities of Miami, Columbia and San Francisco, scient...

    Read More

    Ingredients for Water could be made on Surface of Moon, a chemical factory

    February 24, 2019, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Waxing gibbous moon.
    Credit: Ernie Wright / NASA

    When a stream of charged particles known as the solar wind careens onto the Moon’s surface at 450 kilometers per second (or nearly 1 million miles per hour), they enrich the Moon’s surface in ingredients that could make water, NASA scientists have found.

    Using a computer program, scientists simulated the chemistry that unfolds when the solar wind pelts the Moon’s surface. As the Sun streams protons to the Moon, they found, those particles interact with electrons in the lunar surface, making hydrogen (H) atoms. These atoms then migrate through the surface and latch onto the abundant oxygen (O) atoms bound in the silica (SiO2) and other oxygen-bearing molecules that make up the lunar soil, or regolith...

    Read More

    Earth may be 140 years away from reaching Carbon Levels Not Seen in 56 million years

    February 23, 2019, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    A model for carbon accumulation over time as the sum of carbon emissions, based on the steady increase in emissions and emission rates since 1959. Red circles are annual accumulations through 2015. If the recent trend in emissions continues, we can expect to reach the minimum estimate for PETM-scale carbon accumulation in the year 2159 and the maximum estimate for PETM-scale carbon accumulation in the year 2278.
    Credit: AGU/Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology/Gingerich 2019.

    Total human carbon dioxide emissions could match those of Earth’s last major greenhouse warming event in fewer than five generations, new research finds...

    Read More