Month: August 2017

  • New wrapping material enables high quality bioimaging

    A nanosheet made of organic polymers has been developed to prevent the drying and deforming of biological samples, thus enabling high-quality imaging under microscopes.Be it cosmology or biology, the advancement of science largely relies on the advancement of measuring instruments and methodology. In the past couple of decades, scientists’ passion to see the invisible has…

  • Arctic Ice Cores Document Climate Change in Past 300 Years

    Ice cores from arctic mountain glaciers show a dramatic climate change that began nearly 300 years ago, documenting an unprecedented increase in the intensity and duration of winter storms. Drilled by a Dartmouth-led team, the cores show striking changes in weather patterns that may have reached as far as Florida.“We attribute these changes to a…

  • Drones relay RFID signals for inventory control

    Radio frequency ID tags were supposed to revolutionize supply chain management. The dirt-cheap, battery-free tags, which receive power wirelessly from scanners and then broadcast identifying numbers, enable warehouse managers to log inventory much more efficiently than they could by reading box numbers and recording them manually.

  • Icebergs: Mathematical model calculates the collapse of shelf ice

    Shelf ice, as found in Antarctica, refers to giant floating ice sheets that can span thousands of square kilometres. Pieces break off at their edges which form icebergs in the ocean. In order to more effectively predict these break-offs, in a process known as calving, Julia Christmann from the University of Kaiserslautern (TU) has developed…

  • NASA Gets an In-Depth Look at Intensifying Hurricane Harvey

    As Hurricane Harvey continued to strengthen, NASA analyzed the storm’s rainfall, cloud heights and cloud top temperatures. NASA’s GPM and Aqua satellite provided information while an animation of GOES-East satellite imagery showed Harvey’s progression toward the Texas coast. Harvey's intensification has been aided by movement through an environment that includes low vertical wind shear and the…

  • A Galápagos seabird's population expected to shrink with ocean warming

    Within the next century, rising ocean temperatures around the Galápagos Islands are expected to make the water too warm for a key prey species, sardines, to tolerate. A new study by Wake Forest University biologists, published in PLOS One Aug. 23, uses decades of data on the diet and breeding of a tropical seabird, the Nazca booby,…

  • Researchers identify cheaper, greener biofuels processing catalyst

    Fuels that are produced from nonpetroleum-based biological sources may become greener and more affordable, thanks to research performed at the University of Illinois’ Prairie Research Institutethat examines the use of a processing catalyst made from palladium metal and bacteria.

  • Ringing in ears keeps brain more at attention, less at rest, study finds

    Tinnitus, a chronic ringing or buzzing in the ears, has eluded medical treatment and scientific understanding. A new study by University of Illinois researchers found that chronic tinnitus is associated with changes in certain networks in the brain, and furthermore, those changes cause the brain to stay more at attention and less at rest.

  • Researchers predicted when cholera epidemic in Yemen would peak

    Hokkaido University scientists has developed a new mathematical model which accurately forecasted that a devastating cholera epidemic in Yemen would peak by early July, the 26th week of 2017 and the cumulative incidence would be the order of 700-800 thousand cases.

  • Kepler satellite discovers variability in the Seven Sisters

    The Seven Sisters, as they were known to the ancient Greeks, are now known to modern astronomers as the Pleiades star cluster – a set of stars which are visible to the naked eye and have been studied for thousands of years by cultures all over the world. Now Dr Tim White of the Stellar Astrophysics Centre at Aarhus University and…