Compact genetic testing device created for Covid-19 could be used to detect a range of pathogens, or conditions including cancer.

A virus diagnosis device that gives lab-quality results within just three minutes has been invented by engineers at the University of Bath, who describe it as the ‘world’s fastest Covid test’.

The prototype LoCKAmp device uses innovative ‘lab on a chip’ technology and has been proven to provide rapid and low-cost detection of Covid-19 from nasal swabs. The research team, based at the University of Bath, say the technology could easily be adapted to detect other pathogens such as bacteria — or even conditions like cancer.

The device works by rapidly releasing and amplifying genetic material from a nasal swab sample by carrying out a chemical reactio...

Researchers have developed a virtual reality application where a range of 3D modeling tools can be opened and controlled using just the movement of a user’s hand.

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, used machine learning to develop ‘HotGestures’—analogous to the hot keys used in many desktop applications.

HotGestures give users the ability to build figures and shapes in virtual reality without ever having to interact with a menu, helping them stay focused on a task without breaking their train of thought.

The idea of being able to open and control tools in virtual reality has been a movie trope for decades, but the researchers say that this is the first time such a ‘superhuman’ ability has been made possible...

They reveal the origin of wine, the age of bones and fossils, and they serve as diagnostic tools in medicine. Isotopes and isotopologues—molecules that differ only in the composition of their isotopes—also play an increasingly important role in astronomy. For example, the ratio of carbon-12 (12C) to carbon-13 (13C) isotopes in the atmosphere of an exoplanet allows scientists to infer the distance at which the exoplanet orbits its central star.

Until now, 12C and 13C bound in carbon monoxide were the only isotopologues that could be measured in the atmosphere of an exoplanet. Now a team of researchers has succeeded in detecting ammonia isotopologues in the atmosphere of a cold brown dwarf.

As the team has just reported in the journal Nature, ammonia could be measured in the f...

An international research team has recently observed the Circinus galaxy, which is one of the closest galaxies to the Milky Way, with high enough resolution to gain further insights into the gas flows to and from the black hole at its galactic nucleus.

An international research team led by Takuma Izumi, an assistant professor at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, has observed in high resolution (approximately 1 light year) the active galactic nucleus of the Circinus Galaxy — one of the closest major galaxies to the Milky Way. The observation was made possible by the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) astronomical observatory in Chile.

This breakthrough marks the world’s first quantitative measurement at this scale of gas flows and their structures o...