Imagine a clock that doesn’t have electricity, but its hands and gears spin on their own for all eternity. In a new study, physicists at the University of Colorado Boulder have used liquid crystals, the same materials that are in your phone display, to create such a clock—or, at least, as close as humans can […]
Authors: Gráinne Tyrrell, Doctoral Researcher in Biomedical Device Design, School of Architecture and Product Design, University of Limerick; Eoin White, Associate Professor of Medtech Design, University of Limerick, and Leonard O Sullivan, Professor in Ergonomics and Human Factors, Department of Science and Engineering, University of Limerick “If you can’t handle this, you’ll never keep up […]
Researchers at Institute of Science Tokyo have created a new material platform for non-volatile memories using covalent organic frameworks (COFs), which are crystalline solids with high thermal stability. The researchers successfully installed electric-field-responsive dipolar rotors into COFs. Due to the unique structure of the COFs, the dipolar rotors can flip in response to an electric […]
The mystery of dark matter remains one of the most profound puzzles in modern astrophysics. We know it outweighs ordinary matter by a factor of five, yet it neither shines nor absorbs light. Its presence is betrayed only by the pull of gravity, shaping galaxies and bending light from more distant objects. For decades, scientists […]
T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (T-ALL) is characterized by the accumulation of genetic lesions that induce differentiation arrest, survival and aberrant proliferation of immature T-cell progenitors . Although T-ALL prognosis has significantly improved due to intensive chemotherapy, relapses still occur in 20% of pediatric patients and 50% of adult patients, often with a dismal outcome. To […]
Authors: David Sidhu, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, Carleton University and Penny Pexman, Professor of Psychology, Western University Imagine you’re hiring someone for a job that requires a very kind, agreeable and co-operative person. You have two candidates and all you know about them are their names: Renee and Greta. Who do you think would […]
The Earth supports the only known life in the universe, all of it depending heavily on the presence of liquid water to facilitate chemical reactions. While single-celled life has existed almost as long as Earth itself, it took roughly three billion years for multicellular life to form. Human life has existed for less than one-10 […]
When you look at a crystal—say, a piece of salt or a sheet of graphene—its atoms are not randomly scattered. They form an orderly grid, like tiles on a floor. Because the atoms are arranged in this repeating way, electrons moving through the crystal don’t behave as if they’re in free space. Instead, their motion […]
Biology • Ecology • Environment • Geosciences
Author: Sevrine Sailley, Senior Scientist, Marine Ecosystem Modelling, Plymouth Marine Laboratory Climate change is reshaping fish habitats. Some fish are winners, others are losing out. Fish already face plenty of pressure from overfishing and pollution. Climate change is adding more: warmer waters and shifting food supplies cause what’s known as a predator-prey mismatch. This means […]
We’re often told it is “unscientific” or “meaningless” to ask what happened before the Big Bang. But a new paper by cosmologist Eugene Lim, of King’s College London, UK, and astrophysicists Katy Clough, of Queen Mary University of London, UK, and Josu Aurrekoetxea, at Oxford University, UK, proposes a way forward: using complex computer simulations […]