Recent Comments

    New Gut-Brain Circuits found for Sugar and Fat Cravings

    January 20, 2024, Categories  Health/Medical, Biology/Biotechnology

    Fat, sugar, and the combination of both (chocolate) navigate a gut-brain maze. The blue path represents the sugar route, the green path signifies the fat route, and the yellow path represents the combined impact of fats and sugars. Each path leads to the brain, but the combined route has a greater impact, triggering heightened dopamine release in the reward circuits, emphasizing the synergistic effect of fat-sugar combinations on neural responses. Image credit: Isadora Barga, de Lartigue lab

    A new study has unraveled the internal neural wiring of separate fat and sugar craving pathways. However, combining these pathways overly triggers a desire to eat more than usual. Understanding why we overeat unhealthy foods has been a long-standing mystery...

    Read More

    Researchers create Faster and Cheaper way to Print Tiny Metal Structures with Light

    January 20, 2024, Categories  Physics, Technology/Electronics

    Their technique could transform a scientific field reliant on cost-prohibitive technology. Researchers have developed a light-based means of printing nano-sized metal structures that is 480 times faster and 35 times cheaper than the current conventional method. It is a scalable solution that could transform a scientific field long reliant on technologies that are prohibitively expensive and slow. Their method is called superluminescent light projection (SLP).

    Technological advances in many fields rely on the ability to print metallic structures that are nano-sized — a scale hundreds of times smaller than the width of a human hair.

    Sourabh Saha, assistant professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, and Jungho Choi, a Ph.D...

    Read More

    The Metalens meets the Stars – Large, All-glass Metalens Images Sun, Moon and Nebulae

    January 20, 2024, Categories  Physics, Astronomy/Space

    image of the metalens and camera
    This 10-centimeter-diameter glass metalens can image the sun, the moon and distant nebulae with high resolution. (Credit: Capasso Lab/Harvard SEAS)
     

    Metalenses have been used to image microscopic features of tissue and resolve details smaller than a wavelength of light. Now they are going bigger.

    Researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a 10-centimeter-diameter glass metalens that can image the sun, the moon and distant nebulae with high resolution.

    It is the first all-glass, large-scale metalens in the visible wavelength that can be mass produced using conventional CMOS fabrication technology.

    The research is published in ACS Nano.

    “The ability to accurately control the size of tens of billions of nanopill...

    Read More

    New Vaccine design uses Immunity against Influenza to offer Faster Protection against Emerging Pathogens

    January 19, 2024, Categories  Health/Medical, Biology/Biotechnology

    After COVID vaccination, it usually takes weeks for our bodies to develop protective antibody responses. Imagine, however, a vaccine that speeds up the production of antibodies against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that spreads COVID-19.

    A research team led by Rong Hai, an associate professor of microbiology and plant pathology at the University of California, Riverside, has developed such a vaccine by using preexisting immunity to a separate virus (the influenza virus) to help kickstart the process of making antibodies against SARS-CoV-2.

    “Any delay in the immune response to SARS-CoV-2 means there is some time when people are left poorly protected against the virus,” Hai said...

    Read More