SciGlow | All Science News In One Place
SciGlow is a newsletter of science stories from the major research labs. Headlines link to in-depth articles and editorials. SciGlow keeps scientists and others up-to-date on current research.
Researchers from Lancaster University’s School of Computing and Communications have worked with smart materials on wrist-worn prototypes that can aid people diagnosed with depression, anxiety, and bi-polar disorders in monitoring their emotions. Wrist bands that change colour depending upon the level of emotional arousal allow users to easily see or feel what is happening without … Read more
Soft robots can’t always compete with the hard. Their rigid brethren dominate assembly lines, perform backflips, dance to Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk,” fly, dive, and walk through volcanoes. But each year, soft robots gain new abilities. They’ve learned to jump, squirm, and grip. And, unlike hard robots, they can handle tomatoes without bruising the fruit, … Read more
Entanglement is one of the main principles of quantum mechanics. Physicists from Professor Johannes Fink’s research group at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (IST Austria) have found a way to use a mechanical oscillator to produce entangled radiation. This method, which the authors published in the current edition of Nature, might prove extremely useful … Read more
Nestled between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes mountains, Peru’s coastal region relies on surface water from the Andes for drinking water, industry, and animal and crop farming. The region, which includes Peru’s capital city Lima, is often overwhelmed with rain in the wet season – but by the time the dry season comes, water … Read more
The electronic memory device – described in research published in Scientific Reports – promises to transform daily life with its ultra-low energy consumption. In the home, energy savings from efficient lighting and appliances have been completely wiped out by increased use of computers and gadgets, and by 2025 a ‘tsunami of data’ is expected to consume a … Read more
So you designed a superintelligent machine which has the goal of winning a game of chess. Sounds fairly straightforward. However, the machine has developed its own ‘subgoals’ to ensure it doesn’t lose. It can resist being turned off: a machine that’s turned off cannot win at chess. Suddenly, you have a rogue AI on your … Read more
In “Avengers: Endgame,” Tony Stark warned Scott Lang that sending him into the quantum realm and bringing him back would be a “billion-to-one cosmic fluke”. In reality, shrinking a light beam to a nanometer-sized point to spy on quantum-scale light-matter interactions and retrieving the information is not any easier. Now, engineers at the University of California, … Read more
For polar bears, the insulation provided by their fat, skin, and fur is a matter of survival in the frigid Arctic. For engineers, polar bear hair is a dream template for synthetic materials that might lock in heat just as well as the natural version. Now, materials scientists in China have developed such an insulator, … Read more
Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have come up with a way to manipulate tungsten diselenide (WSe2) –a promising two-dimensional material–to further unlock its potential to enable faster, more efficient computing, and even quantum information processing and storage. Their findings were published today in Nature Communications. Across the globe, researchers have been heavily focused on a class … Read more
One in three UK consumers throw away food solely because it reaches the use-by date, but sixty per cent (4.2million tonnes) of the £12.5 billion-worth of food we throw away each year is safe to eat. The laboratory prototype sensors cost two US cents each to make. Known as ‘paper-based electrical gas sensors’ (PEGS), they … Read more