Staff Reporter

The first walking robot that moves without GPS

Human eyes are insensitive to polarized light and ultraviolet radiation, but that is not the case for ants, who use it to locate themselves in space. Cataglyphis desert ants, in particular, can cover several hundreds of meters in direct sunlight in the desert to find food, then return in a straight line to the nest, without getting lost.

The Life Cycle of an Olive

Olives and olive oil are food staples around the world, but many people do not know that olive trees are one of the oldest growing trees in the world - some may live to be as old as 1,500 years, with the average lifespan being 500 years.

Moving artificial leaves out of the lab and into the air

Artificial leaves mimic photosynthesis -- the process whereby plants use water and carbon dioxide from the air to produce carbohydrates using energy from the sun. But even state-of-the-art artificial leaves, which hold promise in reducing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, only work in the laboratory because they use pure, pressurized carbon dioxide from tanks.

How breast tissue stiffening promotes breast cancer development

A study provides new insight into how the stiffening of breast tissue plays a role in breast cancer development. By examining how mammary cells respond in a stiffness-changing hydrogel, bioengineers at the University of California San Diego discovered that several pathways work together to promote the transformation of breast cells into cancer cells. The work could inspire new approaches to treating patients and inhibiting tumor growth.

BFU physicists developed a new method to identify antibiotics-resistant bacteria

A team of physicists from Immanuel Kant Baltic State University suggested a method to quickly identify single antibiotic-resistant bacteria cells that are the agents of tuberculosis. The new method helps find the bacteria and evaluate their resistance to antibiotics without damaging the biological material. The results of the first trial of the method were published in Data in Brief.

NASA catches the 1-day life of Tropical Cyclone Neil

Tropical Cyclone Neil had a short life in the Southwestern Pacific Ocean. It developed on February 9 and dissipated on February 10. NASA's Aqua satellite captured an image of the storm that developed even while battling wind shear.

Swiss scientists developed probes designed to reveal the physical forces inside living cells

The detection of physical forces is one of the most complex challenges facing science. Although Newton's apple has long solved the problem of gravity, imaging the physical forces that act in living cells remains one of the main mysteries of current biology. Considered to play a decisive role in many biological processes, the chemical tools to visualize the physical forces in action do not exist.

Famous 'sandpile model' shown to move like a traveling sand dune

Researchers at IST Austria find new property of important physical model; results published in PNAS (Photo : Moritz Lang) The so-called Abelian sandpile model has been studied by scientists for more than 30 years to better understand a physical phenomenon called self-organized criticality, which appears in a plethora of real-life situations such as the coordinated firing of brain cells, the spread of forest fires, the distribution of earth quake magnitudes and even in the coordinated behavior of ant colonies.

Gummy-like robots that could help prevent disease

Human tissues experience a variety of mechanical stimuli that can affect their ability to carry out their physiological functions, such as protecting organs from injury. The controlled application of such stimuli to living tissues in vivo and in vitro has now proven instrumental to studying the conditions that lead to disease.

Cryo-force spectroscopy reveals the mechanical properties of DNA components

Physicists from the University of Basel have developed a new method to examine the elasticity and binding properties of DNA molecules on a surface at extremely low temperatures. With a combination of cryo-force spectroscopy and computer simulations, they were able to show that DNA molecules behave like a chain of small coil springs. The researchers reported their findings in Nature Communications.

Scientists discover new type of magnet

A team of scientists has discovered the first robust example of a new type of magnet--one that holds promise for enhancing the performance of data storage technologies.

3D printed tires and shoes that self-repair

Instead of throwing away your broken boots or cracked toys, why not let them fix themselves? Researchers at the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering have developed 3D-printed rubber materials that can do just that.

New scale to characterize strength and impacts of atmospheric river storms

A team of researchers led by Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego has created a scale to characterize the strength and impacts of "atmospheric rivers," long narrow bands of atmospheric water vapor pushed along by strong winds. They are prevalent over the Pacific Ocean and can deliver to the Western United States much of its precipitation during just a few individual winter storms.

The Milky Way in a twist

Our Milky Way galaxy's disk of stars is anything but stable and flat. Instead, it becomes increasingly 'warped' and twisted far away from the Milky Way's center, according to astronomers from National Astronomical Observatories of Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC).

Invisible tags: Physicists at TU Dresden write, read and erase using light

Prof. Reineke and his LEXOS team work with simple plastic foils with a thickness of less than 50 μm, which is thinner than a human hair. In these transparent plastic foils, they introduce organic luminescent molecules. In the beginning, these molecules are in an inactive, dark state. By locally using ultraviolet irradiation, it is possible to turn this dark state into an active, luminescent one.

Virtual lens improves X-ray microscopy

With X-ray microscopes, researchers at PSI look inside computer chips, catalysts, small pieces of bone, or brain tissue. The short wavelength of the X-rays makes details visible that are a million times smaller than a grain of sand - structures in the nanometer range (millionths of a millimeter).

Price disclosure legislation unlikely to lower drug costs

CLEMSON, South Carolina -- The Trump administration's proposal to require pharmaceutical companies to publish drug prices in TV ads is unlikely to help control drug prices, according to a study publishing Jan. 22, 2019, in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Hubble fortuitously discovers a new galaxy in the cosmic neighborhood

Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to study some of the oldest and faintest stars in the globular cluster NGC 6752 have made an unexpected finding. They discovered a dwarf galaxy in our cosmic backyard, only 30 million light-years away. The finding is reported in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters.

Earth's largest extinction event likely took plants first

Little life could endure the Earth-spanning cataclysm known as the Great Dying, but plants may have suffered its wrath long before many animal counterparts, says new research led by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

To catch a wave, rocket launches from top of world

On Jan. 4, 2019, at 4:37 a.m. EST the CAPER-2 mission launched from the Andøya Space Center in Andenes, Norway, on a 4-stage Black Brant XII sounding rocket. Reaching an apogee of 480 miles high before splashing down in the Arctic Sea, the rocket flew through active aurora borealis, or northern lights, to study the waves that accelerate electrons into our atmosphere.

JILA researchers uncover quantum structure of buckyballs

JILA researchers have measured hundreds of individual quantum energy levels in the buckyball, a spherical cage of 60 carbon atoms. It's the largest molecule that has ever been analyzed at this level of experimental detail in the history of quantum mechanics.
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