MIT News November 11, 2020 A camel’s coat, or a person’s clothing, can help to reduce loss of moisture while at the same time allowing enough sweat evaporation to provide a cooling effect. Tests have showed that a shaved camel loses 50 percent more moisture than an unshaved one, under identical conditions. Researchers at MIT have developed a system with a two-layer material with the bottom layer, substituting for sweat glands. It consists of hydrogel, a gelatin-like substance that consists mostly of water, contained in a sponge-like matrix from which the water can easily evaporate. This is covered with an […]
Scientists uncover secrets to designing brain-like devices
Phys.org November 10, 2020 To create devices that mimic what occurs in our brain’s neurons and synapses, researchers need to overcome a fundamental molecular engineering challenge: how to design devices that exhibit controllable and energy-efficient transition between different resistive states triggered by incoming stimuli. A team of researchers in the US (University of Chicago, Argonne National Laboratory) investigated the defective cobaltites and unraveled the structural, electronic, and magnetic changes responsible for the metal-to-insulator transition (MIT) when oxygen vacancies are introduced in the material. They showed that cooperative structural distortions instead of local bonding changes are responsible for the MIT, described […]
Startling Case Study Finds Asymptomatic COVID-19 Carrier Who Shed Virus For 70 Days
Science Alert November 5, 2020 An international team of researchers (USA – NIH, Washington University, industry, UK) have observed long-term SARS-CoV-2 shedding up to 70 days, and genomic and subgenomic RNA up to 105 days past initial diagnosis from the upper respiratory tract of a female immunocompromised patient with chronic lymphocytic leukemia. Several weeks after a second convalescent plasma transfusion, SARS-CoV-2 RNA was no longer detected. They observed marked within-host genomic evolution of SARS-CoV-2, with continuous turnover of dominant viral variants. Their data indicate that certain immunocompromised patients may shed infectious virus for longer durations than previously recognized. They recommend […]
Sticky electrons: When repulsion turns into attraction
EurekAlert November 10, 2020 A few years ago, researchers in Austria were able to clarify mathematically where the boundary lies between the area that follows the known rules and the area where unusual effects play an important role. An international team of researchers (Austria, USA – Georgetown University, Italy, Germany) with the help of complex calculations on supercomputers, has explained exactly what happens when this boundary is crossed: the repulsion between the electrons is suddenly counteracted by an additional attractive force that enables completely counterintuitive effects. By decomposing local and uniform susceptibilities of the Hubbard model via their spectral representations, […]
Tiny device enables new record in super-fast quantum light detection
EurekAlert November 9, 2020 An international team of researchers (UK, France) has made a new miniaturized device by interfacing CMOS-compatible silicon and germanium-on-silicon nanophotonics with silicon-germanium integrated amplification electronics. The detector has a 3 dB bandwidth of 1.7 GHz, is shot noise limited to 9 GHz and has a miniaturized required footprint of 0.84 mm2. The detector can measure the continuous spectrum of squeezing from 100 MHz to 9 GHz of a broadband squeezed light source pumped with a continuous-wave laser. The research provides fast, multipurpose, homodyne detectors for continuous-variable quantum optics, and opens the way to full-stack integration of photonic quantum devices…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Top 10 Science and Technology Inventions for the Week of November 6, 2020
01. Breakthrough quantum-dot transistors create a flexible alternative to conventional electronics 02. DRIVE ReDIRECT: Program Seeks to Develop Countermeasures Against Chemical Threats 03. New technology allows cameras to capture colors invisible to the human eye 04. Physicists develop efficient modem for a future quantum internet 05. Researchers develop a high-power, portable terahertz laser 06. Researchers invent flexible and highly reliable sensor 07. An underwater navigation system powered by sound 08. World’s fastest open-source intrusion detection is here 09. Biodefense Headlines – 2 November 2020 10. Scientists in Japan Just Found a Detailed Record of Earth’s Last Magnetic Switcharoo And others… […]
Artificial intelligence model detects asymptomatic Covid-19 infections through cellphone-recorded coughs
MIT News October 29, 2020 A team of researchers in the US (MIT, Harvard University) developed an AI speech processing framework that leverages acoustic biomarker feature extractors to pre-screen for COVID-19 from cough recordings. CNN-based models have been trained on 4256 subjects and tested on the remaining 1064 subjects of the dataset. When validated with subjects diagnosed using an official test, the model achieved COVID-19 sensitivity of 98.5% with a specificity of 94.2% . For asymptomatic subjects it achieved sensitivity of 100% with a specificity of 83.2%. AI techniques can produce a free, non-invasive, real-time, any-time, instantly distributable, large-scale COVID-19 […]
Biodefense Headlines – 2 November 2020
Global Biodefense November 2, 2020 This week’s selections include partnering with schools for pandemic flu preparedness; validation analysis of the Global Health Security Index; and the hurdles of contact tracing across America… read more.
Breakthrough quantum-dot transistors create a flexible alternative to conventional electronics
Science Daily October 29, 2020 So far, most research on quantum dot electronic devices has focused on materials based on Pb- and Cd chalcogenides. In addition to environmental concerns associated with the presence of toxic metals, these quantum dots are not well suited for applications in CMOS circuits due to difficulties in integrating complementary n- and p-channel transistors in a common quantum dot active layer. A team of researchers in the US (Los Alamos National Laboratory, UC Irvine) demonstrated that by using heavy-metal-free CuInSe2 quantum dots, they could address the problem of toxicity and simultaneously achieve straightforward integration of complimentary […]
Brown carbon ‘tarballs’ detected in Himalayan atmosphere
Science Daily November 4, 2020 Primary brown carbon (BrC) co-emitted with black carbon from biomass burning is an important light-absorbing carbonaceous aerosol. An international team of researchers (China, USA – Georgia Institute of Technology, UK, Hungary) detected light-absorbing tarballs at microscopic scale collected on the northern slope of the Himalayas. About 28% of thousands of individual particles were tarballs. Air mass trajectories, satellite detection, and Weather Research and Forecasting model coupled to Chemistry (WRF-Chem) simulations all indicated that these tarballs were emitted from biomass burning in the Indo-Gangetic Plain. According to the researchers climate model simulation shows a significant heating […]