Versatile Barometer Biosensor Based on Au@Pt Core/Shell Nanoparticle Probe

When it comes to testing for cancer, environmental pollution and food contaminants, traditional sensors can help. The challenges are that they often are bulky, expensive, non-intuitive and complicated. Now, one team reports in ACS Sensors that portable pressure-based detectors coupled with smartphone software could provide a simpler, more affordable alternative while still maintaining sensitivity.

Current disease and contamination sensors require expensive readout equipment or trained personnel. Yuehe Lin, Yong Tang and colleagues propose a new detection system based on pressure changes...

CWRU chemists developed a space-saving method to store digital data optically, using four-symbol, or quaternary code. The four symbols are the absence of color and three colors — fluorescent green, ultramarine and cyan — produced when dyes contained in a common polymer are exposed to heat, ultraviolet light or both. Credit: Emily Pentzer

Chemists at Case Western Reserve University have found a way to possibly store digital data in half the space current systems require. From supercomputers to smartphones, the amount of data people generate and collect continues to grow exponentially, and the need to store all that information grows with it. To reduce storage space, engineers have traditionally used existing technology but made it smaller...

This artist’s concept shows what the young, dead, disk galaxy MACS2129-1, right, would look like when compared with the Milky Way galaxy, left. Although three times as massive as the Milky Way, it is only half the size. MACS2129-1 is also spinning more than twice as fast as the Milky Way. Note that regions of Milky Way are blue from bursts of star formation, while the young, dead galaxy is yellow, signifying an older star population and no new star birth. Credit: NASA, ESA, and Z. Levy (STScI)

By combining the power of a “natural lens” in space with the capability of Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers made a surprising discovery – the first example of a compact yet massive, fast-spinning, disk-shaped galaxy that stopped making stars only a few billion years after the big bang...

400 kilometres above the ground, in the ISS space station, you can’t just stick your head out the window and breathe fresh air, if harmful gases should leak into the indoor environment of NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson and her colleagues. Now, Norwegian and German technologists are developing new and fast working technology for monitoring the indoor air in the space station. Credit: NASA

How do we prevent astronauts in space from inhaling hazardous gases? A German-Norwegian hi-tech optical gas sensor provides a solution. “Astronauts must receive early warnings if harmful or unpleasant gases get mixed in with their breathing air,” says Senior Scientist Atle Honne at SINTEF. “Because in space you can’t just open a window to ventilate the room,” he says.

As a child he read everything he could l...