Category: TRENDS IN HI-TECH SCIENCE

Researchers in the U.S. and China have collaborated to create a tiny microchip that carries out its calculations in memory instead of requiring separate chips for processing and data storage. It’s twice as energy-efficient as today’s chips that combine memory and processing and delivers results that are just as accurate, the inventors say.   The chip...

At Yale University’s medical school, researchers have restored some brain and cellular functions in pigs that have been dead for as long as four hours. Within a minute or two of death, animal and human tissues lose their supply of oxygen and begin to break down. However, in 2019, Yale’s research team unveiled what they...

Every living thing from bacteria to weeds to humans is made of proteins. Last year, the artificial intelligence (AI) AlphaFold, created by researchers at Google parent Alphabet, fleshed out the catalog of human proteins by completing chemical structures that scientists had only been able to calculate in part. The way a protein is structured or...

Influit, a start-up spun off of the Illinois Institute of Technology, has unveiled the latest entry in the contest to replace lithium batteries. The company refers to its creation as “nanoelectrofuel.” It’s a version of a flow battery—a cell in which two chemical solutions flow past each other on opposite sides of a membrane, transmitting electrons and creating an...

Making building materials is a messy business. Making the cement used in concrete accounts for as much as 8 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions.  Engineers have tried mixing wood waste, coal ash, and even ground-up tires into concrete to moderate its environmental impact. At Australia’s Flinders University, researchers decided to do without concrete...

Ultrasound can tell physicians a lot about what’s going on inside your body but it’s not convenient: the equipment is big and clunky, only available in a medical office, and the technician operating the gear has to smear goo on you to make the best medium for the sound waves to travel through. Now engineers...

Living things are protein patterns.  In the human body, about 20,000 different proteins create our various bones and tissues, operate our chemical processes, and create illnesses when proteins go awry. How a protein molecule is shaped is key to its function and recently, researchers have been using artificial intelligence (AI) to predict proteins’ 3D structures...

Taking samples of bacteria from 29 lakes in Norway, scientists found several strains of the bugs that grow hale and hearty by eating the remains of plastic bags that can drift into open waters. The researchers took water samples containing bacteria from the lakes and then added bits of “plastic leachate,” the microscopic bits of...

In the world’s 20 million people who have type 1 diabetes, the pancreas is damaged, often by the body’s own immune system, and the organ’s so-called “beta” cells lose their ability to make insulin. Without insulin, the body can’t process sugars into energy. The treatment is a lifetime of twice-daily insulin injections. Other cures have...