Recent Comments

    Mechanism that Helps Immune Cells to Invade Tissues

    January 10, 2022, Categories  Biology/Biotechnology, Health/Medical

    Immune cell invasion. While in the above picture immune cells (bright green) are able to invade the tissue of the fruit fly embryo on the central top side, they are less successful when their protective shell is weakened (picture below). © Stephanie Wachner / IST Austria

    To fight infections and heal injuries, immune cells need to enter tissue. They also need to invade tumors to fight them from within. Scientists have now discovered how immune cells protect their sensitive insides as they squeeze between tissue cells. The team lays the foundation for identifying new targets in cancer treatment.

    Knowing, when exactly immune cells will try to invade a tumor is difficult...

    Read More

    Novel Memory Technology based on Compound Semiconductors

    January 10, 2022, Categories  Physics, Technology/Electronics

    ULTRARAM device concept. a) Schematic cross-section of a device with corresponding material layers. The floating gate (FG), triple-barrier resonant-tunneling structure (TBRT), and readout channel are highlighted. Arrows indicate the direction of electron flow during program/erase operations. b) Scanning electron micrograph of a fabricated device of 10 µm gate length. c,d) Nonequilibrium Green’s functions (NEGF) calculations of density of states alongside conduction band diagrams for no applied bias (i.e., retention) and program-cycle bias respectively. B1, B2, and B3 are the AlSb barrier layers. QW1 and QW2 are the InAs quantum wells in the TBRT. Credit: DOI: 10.1002/aelm.202101103

    A pioneering type of patented computer memory known as ULTRARAM has been demonstrated on silicon wafers ...

    Read More

    Eccentric Exoplanet discovered

    January 8, 2022, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    TESS target pixel files of Sectors 14, 20, 21, and 26 that observed TOI-2257, generated by means of tpfplotter (Aller et al. 2020). The apertures used to extract the photometry by the SPOC pipeline are shown as red shaded regions. The Gaia DR2 catalog (Gaia Collaboration 2018) is over-plotted, with all sources of up to 6 magnitudes in contrast with TOI-2257 shown as red circles. We note that the symbol size scales with the magnitude contrast. While the star is relatively isolated, there is a small amount of contamination from outside sources, ranging from 2–5% of the total flux. Credit: DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202142280

    Eccentric exoplanet discovered Led by the University of Bern, an international research team has discovered a sub-Neptune exoplanet orbiting a red dwarf star...

    Read More

    Windows that Outsmart the Elements

    January 7, 2022, Categories  Physics, Technology/Electronics

    New research takes energy efficient windows a step further by proposing a new “smart window” design that would harvest the sun’s energy in the winter to warm the house and reflect it in the summer to keep it cool.

    Homeowners know that the type of windows in a house contribute greatly to heating and cooling efficiency. And that’s a big deal — maintaining indoor temperatures consumes great amounts of energy and accounts for 20 to 40 percent of the national energy budgets in developed countries. The work was recently published in the journal ACS Photonics and funded as part of the EPSRC Wearable and Flexible Technologies Collaboration.

    “The major innovation is that these windows can change according to seasonal needs,” explained Nathan Youngblood, assistant professor of electrical ...

    Read More