A team led by researchers from the University of Glasgow has developed an innovative wireless communications antenna that combines the unique properties of metamaterials with sophisticated signal processing to deliver a new peak of performance.

In a paper published in the IEEE Open Journal of Antennas and Propagation, titled “60 GHz Programmable Dynamic Metasurface Antenna (DMA) for Next-Generation Communication, Sensing, and Imaging Applications: From Concept to Prototype,” the researchers showcase their development of a prototype digitally coded dynamic metasurface antenna, or DMA, controlled through high-speed field-programmable gate array (FPGA).

Their DMA is the first in the world designed and demonstrated at the operating frequ...

What if changes in a person’s stress levels could be detected while they sleep using wearable devices? A new study by University of Vermont researchers published in PLOS Digital Health is the first to find changes in perceived stress levels reflected in sleep data—an important step towards identifying biomarkers that may help flag individuals in need of support.

Given how critical sleep is to physical and mental health, the research team suspected signals might exist in sleep data, says Laura Bloomfield, a research assistant professor of mathematics and statistics and lead author of the study. “Changes in stress are visible.”

When parsing baseline sleep data, the researchers found “consistent associations” between people’s perceived stress scores and factors such as total slee...

In “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” Captain Picard and the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise leverage the Holodeck, an empty room capable of generating 3D environments, of preparing for missions and entertaining them, simulating everything from lush jungles to the London of Sherlock Holmes.

Deeply immersive and fully interactive, Holodeck-created environments are infinitely customizable, using nothing but language; the crew has only to ask the computer to generate an environment, and that space appears in the Holodeck.

Today, virtual interactive environments are also used to train robots prior to real-world deployment in a process called “Sim2...

When astronomers looked at a stellar pair at the heart of a stunning cloud of gas and dust, they were in for a surprise. Star pairs are typically very similar, like twins, but in HD 148937, one star appears younger and, unlike the other, is magnetic.

New data from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) suggest there were originally three stars in the system, until two of them clashed and merged. This violent event created the surrounding cloud and forever altered the system’s fate.

“When doing background reading, I was struck by how special this system seemed,” says Abigail Frost, an astronomer at ESO in Chile and lead author of the study, “A magnetic massive star has experienced a stellar merger,” published in Science.

The system, HD 148937, is located about 3800 light-year...