Particles from the sun are constantly hitting the surface of mercury. Credit: NASA, montage: TU Wien

The planets and moons of our solar system are continuously being bombarded by particles hurled away from the sun. On Earth this has hardly any effect, apart from the fascinating northern lights, because the dense atmosphere and the magnetic field of the Earth protect us from these solar wind particles. But on the Moon or on Mercury things are different: There, the uppermost layer of rock is gradually eroded by the impact of sun particles.

New results of the TU Wien now show that previous models of this process are incomplete. The effects of solar wind bombardment are in some cases much more drastic than previously thought...

Therepi’s reservoir, which would attach directly to the damaged heart tissue, is placed on a dime for size reference and connected to a self-sealing subcutaneous port. Credit: Nature Biomedical Engineering, Whyte et al.; Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license

A team of researchers is hoping to halt the progression from heart attack to heart failure with a small device called ‘Therepi.’ The device contains a reservoir that attaches directly to the damaged heart tissue. A refill line connects the reservoir to a port on or under the patient’s skin where therapies can be injected either by the patient or a healthcare professional.

After a patient has a heart attack, a cascade of events leading to heart failure begins...

The fabricated transceiver only measures 3 mm × 4 mm and consists of four transmitting and receiving elements. The subcomponents of TRX1 are displayed. Credit: IEEE Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits Symposium 2018

Scientists at Tokyo Institute of Technology have designed and fabricated a tiny, but incredibly fast, reliable, and accurate 28-GHz transceiver meant for stable high-speed 5G communications. The fabricated transceiver trumps previous designs in various regards by taking a new approach for beam steering.

The importance of wireless communications is evident in modern societies, and thus, a lot of work has been done on 5G communications as it is the upcoming big step in mobile networks...

This cometary-type interplanetary dust particle was collected by a NASA stratospheric aircraft. Its porous aggregate structure is evident in this scanning electron microscope image. Credit: Hope Ishii/University of Hawaii

Chemical studies show that dust particles originated in a low-temperature environment. Experiments conducted at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) helped to confirm that samples of interplanetary particles – collected from Earth’s upper atmosphere and believed to originate from comets – contain dust leftover from the initial formation of the solar system.

An international team, led by Hope Ishii, a researcher at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (UH Manoa), studied the particles’ chemical composition using infrared light at Ber...