Author: Leah Burrows, Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences The earliest blacksmiths in the Bronze and Iron Ages figured out that when they deformed metal through bending or hammering, it became stronger. This process, known as work or strain hardening, is still used widely in metallurgy and manufacturing today to increase […]
Condensed matter • DIPC Interfaces • Materials • Nanotechnology • Quantum physics
Molecular spintronics is an emerging field that combines ferromagnetic materials with organic or metal–organic semiconductors. It benefits from the unique and exceptional properties of organic molecules, which go beyond inorganic ones. The strong response of many organic molecules to electrical, optical, ferromagnetic or antiferromagnetic stimuli bring new potential functionalities to the spintronic device. An effective […]
Researchers at the University of Toronto are using artificial intelligence to accelerate scientific breakthroughs in the search for sustainable energy. They have used the Canadian Light Source (CLS) at the University of Saskatchewan (USask) to confirm that an AI-generated “recipe” for a new catalyst offered a more efficient way to make hydrogen fuel . To […]
Many (if not most) clinical trials end up failing, but given the bias towards positive results sometimes the reasons for their not working remain unclear. Luckily, a team at Open Targets and EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) have analysed the reasons for aborted clinical trials mentioned in Clinicaltrials.gov, the open-source register for clinical trials worldwide […]
Freshwater scarcity affects over two billion people in the world, primarily in arid and remote regions, as well as islands and coastal areas without freshwater sources. Climate change and population growth are only making the problem worse, and existing methods require an energy input, usually electrical. Renewable energy can fix this and is required for […]
Periodic responses to nonperiodic energy inputs, such as oscillations, are hallmarks of living systems. Researchers have devoted considerable efforts to understanding and mimicking natural self-assembled structures and functions to systems composed of nonbiological components. This has rendered remarkable developments in regulating interparticle interactions to form static and dynamic self-assemblies. Dynamic assemblies can, under suitable stimuli […]
Author: Claire Hendershot, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard Developing a new drug can take years of research and cost millions of dollars. Still, more than 90% of drug candidates fail in clinical trials, with even more that never make it to the clinical stage. Many drugs fail because they simply aren’t safe. Researchers at […]
Chemical engineering • Food processing • Materials • Mechanical Engineering • Nanotechnology
Imagine a close basketball game that comes down to the final shot. The probability of the ball going through the hoop might be fairly low, but it would dramatically increase if the player were afforded the opportunity to shoot it over and over. A similar idea is at play in the scientific field of membrane […]
Author: Ambuj Tewari, Professor of Statistics, University of Michigan Over 100 years ago, Alexander Graham Bell asked the readers of National Geographic to do something bold and fresh – “to found a new science.” He pointed out that sciences based on the measurements of sound and light already existed. But there was no science of […]
Any particle accelerator needs a reliable electron or ion source as a first, humble but essential and critical component. The world’s most powerful particle accelerator today -the Large Hadron Collider- extracts its protons from a single bottle of Hydrogen gas. Ion sources produce beams for a large variety of different scientific experiments, industrial processes and […]