Sunshine streaming through a window could be directly harnessed for wireless data transmission to electronic devices. KAUST researchers have designed a smart glass system that can modulate the sunlight passing through it, encoding data into the light that can be detected and decoded by devices in the room. The use of sunlight to send data would offer a greener mode of communication compared to conventional Wi-Fi or cellular data transmission.

Basem Shihada had been exploring data encoding into an artificial light source when he had the lightbulb moment to use sunshine...

A multi-institution study led by Rohan Dharmakumar, PhD, of Indiana University School of Medicine, has identified that iron drives the formation of fatty tissue in the heart and leads to chronic heart failure in about fifty percent of heart attack survivors. The discovery, recently published in Nature Communications, paves the way for treatments that have the potential to prevent heart failure in nearly half a million people a year in the United States, and many millions more worldwide.

“For the first time, we have identified a root cause of chronic heart failure following a heart attack,” Dharmakumar said.

Dharmakumar is executive director of IU’s Krannert Cardiovascular Researc...

Finding paves the way for new generation of opto-electronic applications. Quantum dots are clusters of some 1,000 atoms which act as one large ‘super-atom’. It is possible to accurately design the electronic properties of these dots just by changing their size...

A trio of researchers from Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Universität Innsbruck and the University of Geneva, respectively, has discovered a “stripped, pulsating core of a massive star” for the first time. In their paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy, Andreas Irrgang, Norbert Przybilla and Georges Meynet, describe the unique object and the work that they did in verifying its makeup.

Stellar cores, as their name suggests, are the innermost parts of stars. Most often, such cores are covered by what space scientists call their “opaque envelope.” Theory has suggested that such cores can appear without their envelope if conditions arise that lead to its removal. But until now, this had never been observed.

In their pap...