Heart failure is a leading cause of death worldwide and is especially deadly for people who don’t have access to medical facilities. A team of researchers aims to bring heart failure screening from the lab to the home with a point-of-care electrochemical biosensor prototype that measures levels of two biomarkers for heart failure in as little as 15 minutes from just a drop of saliva.

Trey Pittman, a graduate student at Colorado State University, will present his team’s research at the fall meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS).

“Our device would be ideal for people who are at high risk for heart failure but have limited access to a ...

Researchers have identified the specific locations from which most of the approximately 200 Martian meteorites originate. They’ve traced the meteorites to five impact craters within two volcanic regions on the red planet called Tharsis and Elysium. Their study was published recently in the journal Science Advances.

Martian meteorites find their way to Earth when something hits the surface of Mars hard enough so that material is “blasted off the surface and accelerated fast enough to leave Mars’ gravity,” says Chris Herd, curator of the U of A’s Meteorite Collection and professor in the Faculty of Science...

Overlap in genes suggests a potential new class of inborn errors of immunometabolism. Inherited diseases of metabolism and immunity have more in common than previously recognized, according to a new study published in the journal Science Immunology. The findings point to a new set of metabolic genes that are important for the function of immune system T cells, and they offer insights that could improve care for patients with these disorders.

The study examined genes that cause inborn errors of metabolism (disorders of the processes that cells use to convert food to energy) and inborn errors of immunity (disorders that...

Lithium-metal batteries could exhibit significantly higher energy densities than lithium-ion batteries, which are the primary battery technology on the market today. Yet lithium-metal cells also typically have significant limitations, the most notable of which is a short lifespan.

Researchers at University of Science and Technology of China and other institutes recently introduced a new electrolyte design that could be used to develop highly performing lithium-metal pouch cells with longer lifespans. This electrolyte, presented in a paper in Nature Energy, has a unique nanometer-scale solvation structure, with pairs of ions densely packed together into compact ion-pair aggregates (CIPA).

“The primary objectives of our recent work are to markedly accelerate the practical applicat...