Posts

With the power-conversion efficiency of silicon solar cells plateauing around 25%, perovskites are now ideally placed to become the market’s next generation of photovoltaics. In particular, organic-inorganic lead halide perovskites offer manufacturing versatility that can potentially translate into much higher efficiency: studies have already shown photovoltaic performances above 20% across different solar cell architectures built with simple and low-cost processes. The main challenge for the perovskite field is not so much efficiency but stability....

Headteachers and school leaders have described how an ‘avalanche’ of confused and shifting Government guidance severely impeded schools during the critical first months of COVID lockdown in a new study. The research compiles data gathered from almost 300 heads and other school leaders in June 2020, as schools were beginning to reopen after the first wave of closures. It documents leadership teams’ struggles with overwhelming and disorganized information dumps by Government and the Department for Education (DfE), which were often issued with barely any notice and then continually updated....

Now researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin have found that by extracting cholesterol from host cell membranes, H. pylori breaks down a vital component needed to assemble the receptors for interferons. These cytokines are key signaling molecules for summoning the adaptive immune system to the infected mucosa – and their absence generates a niche where the bacteria can survive while the inflammation continues unabated in the surrounding area....

In mid-March, in response to the unfolding COVID-19 pandemic, MIT Medical quickly set up testing tents where essential workers and others who remained on campus could be safely screened for the novel coronavirus. In the tents, nurses and physicians administered nasal swabs while dressed in full personal protective equipment, or PPE. It soon became clear that to safely test on a daily basis, medical workers needed to regularly replenish their PPE — a resource in short, desperate supply....

From sweet treats to holiday indulgences, candy plays a big role in American culture, with consumption surging around Valentine’s Day, Halloween, Easter, and Christmas. Sugar, whether it’s derived from sugar cane, sugar beets or corn, is a primary ingredient in all candies, partly because it can be masterfully crafted to all sorts of different sizes, shapes, and textures. Whether you are nibbling on rock candy, chewing on taffy, munching on jellybeans or licking a lollipop, you’re basically eating spoonfuls of sugar....

Seeing is believing, except when you don’t believe what you see. Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have found a puzzling arc of light behind an extremely massive cluster of galaxies residing 10 billion light-years away. The galactic grouping, discovered by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, was observed when the universe was roughly a quarter of its current age of 13.7 billion years. The giant arc is the stretched shape of a more distant galaxy whose light is distorted by the monster cluster’s powerful gravity, an effect called gravitational lensing....

Within a generation, scientists have now discovered more than 5,000 exoplanets and predict the potential existence of trillions more in the Milky Way galaxy alone. Each discovery inspires more questions than answers about how and why life emerged on Earth and whether it exists elsewhere in the universe. Technological advancements, such as the James Webb Space Telescope and interplanetary missions to Mars, accelerate access to an overwhelming volume of new observations and data, such that it will take the convergence of a multidisciplinary network to understand the emergence of life in the universe....

Biomedical engineers at Duke University have devised a method for making small particles that are safe for living tissues that will allow them to create new shapes attractive for drug delivery, diagnostics, and tissue engineering. The results appear online on March 12, 2020, in the journal Nature Communications. “With nothing more than some heat and light, we can make some pretty bizarre microparticles,” said Stefan Roberts, a biomedical engineering research scientist at Duke....

The scientists published their findings in the American Journal of Primatology. The animals are omnivores, eating insects, small birds, reptiles, eggs, fruits, nectar and other vegetation. Slow lorises have unique fur coloration on their bodies and faces and a toxic bite. They are rated as Vulnerable / Endangered on the IUCN Red List. Historically, many species went unrecognized and were falsely lumped together as one species, states Rachel Munds, of the University of Missouri Columbia and lead author....

The human liver has an astonishing ability to regenerate, unlike the heart, for example. The underlying biological mechanisms are an example of the role played by our gut bacteria in processes taking place in other organs. This is demonstrated in new research conducted by an interdisciplinary team from the TUM University Hospital Klinikum rechts der Isar and the TUM School of Life Sciences. Short-chain fatty acids are needed for growth A healthy gut microbiome consists of many types of bacteria....

As part of that effort, a team including UChicago cosmochemist Nicolas Dauphas performed the largest study to date of oxygen isotopes in lunar rocks, and found a small but measurable difference in the makeup of the moon and Earth. Published March 28 in Science Advances, the research proposes that Earth acquired the majority of its water during the main stage of its growth—which counters a popular theory. The most widely accepted theory of the origin of the Moon speculates that a giant object smashed into the proto-Earth at just enough velocity that part of both bodies broke off and formed the moon....

A University of Birmingham-led study funded by the UK Coronavirus Immunology Consortium has found that many patients with COVID-19 produce immune responses against their body’s own tissues or organs. COVID-19 has been associated with a variety of unexpected symptoms, both at the time of infection and for many months afterward. It is not fully understood what causes these symptoms, but one of the possibilities is that COVID-19 is triggering an autoimmune process where the immune system is misdirected to attack itself....

An international team led by researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) used advanced techniques in electron microscopy to show how the ratio of materials that make up a lithium-ion battery electrode affects its structure at the atomic level, and how the surface is very different from the rest of the material. The work was published in the journal Energy & Environmental Science. Knowing how the internal and surface structure of a battery material changes over a wide range of chemical compositions will aid future studies on cathode transformations and could also lead to the development of new battery materials....

To better understand how much marijuana or constituent compounds actually get into breast milk and how long it remains, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine conducted a study, which will be published online today (August 27) in the journal Pediatrics. Fifty-four samples from 50 women who used marijuana either daily, weekly, or sporadically — with inhalation being the primary method of intake — were examined. Researchers detected THC, the primary psychoactive component of marijuana, in 63 percent of the breast milk samples for up to six days after the mother’s last reported use....

Led by researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, its Perlmutter Cancer Center, and Harvard University, the study showed that death rates among white Americans — the group that accounts for almost all cases — climbed 7.5 percent between 1986 and 2013, but then dropped by nearly 18 percent over the next three years. The death rates were for metastatic melanoma, the aggressive form that spreads from the skin to other organs, such as the lung, liver, or brain....

This is significant because moganite is a mineral that requires water to form, reinforcing the belief that water exists on the Moon. “Moganite is a crystal of silicon dioxide and is similar to quartz. It forms on Earth as a precipitate when alkaline water including SiO2 is evaporated under high-pressure conditions,” says Kayama. “The existence of moganite strongly implies that there is water activity on the Moon.” Kayama and his team analyzed 13 of the lunar meteorites using sophisticated methods to determine the chemical compositions and structures of their minerals....

Typically, a supermassive black hole (SMBH) exists at the core of a massive galaxy. But sometimes SMBHs may “wander” throughout their host galaxy, remaining far from the center in regions such as the stellar halo, a nearly spherical area of stars and gas that surrounds the main section of the galaxy. Astronomers theorize that this phenomenon often occurs as a result of mergers between galaxies in an expanding universe. A smaller galaxy will join with a larger, main galaxy, depositing its own, central SMBH onto a wide orbit within the new host....

The device, which has no moving parts, works by a process called radiative cooling. It blocks incoming sunlight to keep from heating it up, and at the same time efficiently radiates infrared light — which is essentially heat — that passes straight out into the sky and into space, cooling the device significantly below the ambient air temperature. The key to the functioning of this simple, inexpensive system is a special kind of insulation, made of a polyethylene foam called aerogel....

Public-key encryption protocols are complicated, and in computer networks, they’re executed by software. But that won’t work in the internet of things, an envisioned network that would connect many different sensors — embedded in vehicles, appliances, civil structures, manufacturing equipment, and even livestock tags — to online servers. Embedded sensors that need to maximize battery life can’t afford the energy and memory space that software execution of encryption protocols would require....

Now engineers at MIT have found that, for bats and other hairy-tongued nectar feeders, the key to drinking efficiently lies in a delicate balance between the spacing of hairs on the tongue, the thickness of the fluid, and the “speed of retraction,” or how fast an animal darts its tongue back to slurp up the nectar. When all three of these parameters are in balance, a good amount of nectar reaches the animal’s mouth instead of dribbling away....