Curated News: Featured: SciWire

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New research by Berkeley Lab scientists could help usher in a new generation of high-definition displays, optoelectronic devices, photodetectors, and more. They have shown that a class of “soft” semiconductors can be used to emit multiple, bright colors from a single nanowire at resolutions as small as 500 nanometers. The work could challenge quantum dot displays that rely upon traditional semiconductor nanocrystals to emit light.

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Onions are low in calories and packed with vitamins, minerals and antioxidants. However, as everyone from expert chefs to culinary novices has learned, onions can bring a tear to your eye, and an expert from the Texas A&M College of Medicine explains why that happens.

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An area of West Antarctica more than twice the size of California partially melted in 2016 when warm winds forced by an especially strong El Niño blew over the continent, an international group of researchers has determined.

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A new study by a UW-Madison undergraduate not only firms up the idea that we exist in one of the holes of the Swiss cheese structure of the cosmos, but helps ease the apparent disagreement between different measurements of the Hubble Constant, the unit cosmologists use to describe the rate at which the universe is expanding today.

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Northern Congo’s notorious elephant poacher and ivory trafficker Daring Dissaka, 39, has been convicted and sentenced to five years imprisonment.

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When scientists at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory focused the full intensity of the world’s most powerful X-ray laser on a small molecule, they got a surprise: A single laser pulse stripped all but a few electrons out of the molecule’s biggest atom from the inside out, leaving a void that started pulling in electrons from the rest of the molecule, like a black hole gobbling a spiraling disk of matter.

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Scientists are now confident animal life on solid ground started with a few short bursts of marine creatures making the leap from the oceans. New research at the University of Portsmouth also paints a clear picture of how animals rapidly spread out and changed once they made the leap.

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Astronomers have watched as a massive, dying star was likely reborn as a black hole. It took the combined power of the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT), and NASA's Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes to go looking for remnants of the vanquished star, only to find that it disappeared out of sight.

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A-tisket, A-tasket. You can tell a lot from a basket. Especially if it’s from ancient ruins of a civilization inhabited by humans 15,000 years ago. An archaeologist is among the team that made a groundbreaking discovery in coastal Peru – home to one of the earliest pyramids in South America. Thousands of artifacts, including elaborate hand-woven baskets, show that early humans in that region were a lot more advanced than originally thought and had very complex social networks.

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A University of Washington-led international team of astronomers has used data gathered by the Kepler Space Telescope to observe and confirm details of the outermost of seven exoplanets orbiting the star TRAPPIST-1.

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Astronomers have constructed the first map of the Universe based on the positions of supermassive black holes, which reveals the large-scale structure of the Universe.

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West Virginia University professor Hota GangaRao and Praveen Majjigapu, a Ph.D. student in civil engineering, have developed a system that will increase the strength and endurance of structures in earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes and other large blasts, helping communities prevent catastrophe. The system is also beneficial for repairing historic or aging structures.

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WCS scientists have discovered a refuge for corals where the environment protects otherwise sensitive species to the increasing severity of climate change.

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Engineering researchers at the University of Minnesota have developed a revolutionary process for 3D printing stretchable electronic sensory devices that could give robots the ability to feel their environment. The discovery is also a major step forward in printing electronics on real human skin.

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Probing deeper into the South African cave system known as Rising Star, which last year yielded the largest cache of hominin fossils known to science, an international team of researchers has discovered another chamber with more remains of a newfound human relative, Homo naledi. The discovery of the new fossils representing the remains of at least three juvenile and adult specimens includes a “wonderfully complete skull,” says University of Wisconsin-Madison anthropologist John Hawks.

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Scientists have completed the first outdoor field trial sanctioned by the EPA for genetically engineered algae. A genetically engineered strain of algae tested in outdoor ponds demonstrated that genetically engineered algae can be successfully cultivated outdoors without adversely impacting native algae populations.

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Explorers planning to settle on Mars might be able to turn the planet’s red soil into bricks without needing to use an oven or additional ingredients. Instead, they would just need to apply pressure to compact the soil—the equivalent of a blow from a hammer. These are the findings of a study published in Nature Scientific Reports on April 27, 2017. The study was authored by a team of engineers at the University of California San Diego and funded by NASA.

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A new scientific discovery game called Mozak is allowing video gamers to significantly speed up reconstructing the intricate architecture of brain cells, a fundamental task in 21st century brain science. These citizen scientists have outperformed computers in tracing the intricate shapes of neurons, a first step in understanding how our brain circuitry works.

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Violent winds and shockwaves would account for more than 60 per cent of lives lost if an asteroid were to hit the Earth, according to a new University of Southampton-led study.

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With Earth Day approaching, new research from Binghamton University-State of New York could help U.S. residents save more energy, regardless of location, if they adjust the angles of solar panels four to five times a year.

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Despite the internet-dependent nature of our world, a thorough understanding of the internet’s physical makeup has only recently emerged, thanks to painstaking work by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers and their collaborators.

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Research conducted at the University of Adelaide has discovered that bees have much better vision than was previously known, offering new insights into the lives of honey bees, and new opportunities for translating this knowledge into fields such as robot vision.

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Male jumping spiders will try to mate with any female, but that lack of discretion could cost them their lives, says a University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences researcher.

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Ten images and two videos by University of Wisconsin–Madison students, faculty and staff have been named winners of the university's 2017 Cool Science Image Contest.

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A new, open-source software platform has been designed to support applications required to create a smart power grid and protect it from dangers ranging from terrorists to falling tree limbs.

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Brain size in primates is predicted by diet, an analysis by a team of New York University anthropologists indicates. These results call into question “the social brain hypothesis,” which has posited that humans and other primates are big-brained due to factors pertaining to sociality.

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When geologists went in search for evidence of ancient tsunamis along Southern California’s coastal wetlands, they found something else. Their discoveries have implications for seismic hazard and risk assessment in coastal Southern California.

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More than 50 million years ago, when the Earth experienced a series of extreme global warming events, early mammals responded by shrinking in size. While this mammalian dwarfism has previously been linked to the largest of these events, research led by the University of New Hampshire has found that this evolutionary process can happen in smaller, so-called hyperthermals, indicating an important pattern that could help shape an understanding of underlying effects of current human-caused climate change.

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Researchers in Italy hope to measure Earth’s rotation using a laser-based gyroscope housed deep underground, with enough experimental precision to reveal measurable effects of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. The ring laser gyroscope technology enabling these Earth-based measurements provide, unlike those made by referencing celestial objects, inertial rotation information, revealing fluctuations in the rotation rate from the grounded reference frame. The group discusses their work in this week’s Review of Scientific Instruments.

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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has found that the black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy ate its last big meal about 6 million years ago, when it consumed a large clump of infalling gas. After the meal, the engorged black hole burped out a colossal bubble of gas weighing the equivalent of millions of suns, which now billows above and below our galaxy's center.

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Researchers at the University of Iowa have proposed a new approach to sampling materials with weak or no magnetic fields. The method could help advance research in a host of fields, from computing to MRI machines. The results were published in the journal “Physical Review Letters.”

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Feedbacks of clouds on climate change strongly influence the magnitude of global warming.

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Iron particles generated by cities and industry are being dissolved by man-made air pollution and washed into the sea – potentially increasing the amount of greenhouse gases that the world’s oceans can absorb, a new study suggests.

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Irvine, Calif., March 1, 2017 – The combination of prolonged hot spells with poor air quality greatly compounds the negative effects of each and can pose a major risk to human health, according to new research from the University of California, Irvine.“The weather factors that drive heat waves also contribute to intensified surface ozone and air pollution episodes,” said UCI professor of Earth system science Michael J.

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NASA is developing a new family of flexible heat-shield systems with a woven carbon-fiber base material, and is using X-rays at Berkeley Lab's Advanced Light Source to test the designs.

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We all do it; we all need it – humans and animals alike. Neuroscientists have been studying Mexican cavefish to provide insight into the evolutionary mechanisms regulating sleep loss and the relationship between sensory processing and sleep.

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Sound travels more slowly than light. Then why do sounds of meteors entering earth's atmosphere precede or accompany the sight of them? Sandia researchers believe they have an answer.

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Abnormal conditions in the northeast Pacific Ocean, nicknamed “the blob,” put ozone levels in June 2015 higher than normal over a large swath of the Western U.S.

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A collaborative study involving Brookhaven, MIT, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro suggests the gas cloud from which our solar system formed lasted about 4 million years.

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The creature has a considerably shorter and stronger neck with larger muscles than the long graceful necks of others in its species.

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James Cook University scientists have helped discover the remnants of a massive undersea landslide on the Great Barrier Reef.

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A compound extracted from a deep-water marine sponge collected near the Bahamas is showing potent antibacterial activity against the drug resistant bacteria methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) also called the “super bug.”

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A new study probes the origins of carnivory in several distantly related plants — including the Australian, Asian and American pitcher plants, which appear strikingly similar to the human (or insect) eye.

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Previous studies have linked the chemicals to kidney and testicular cancers, thyroid disease, low birth weight and immunotoxicity in children, among other health issues.

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China’s rapid ascent to global economic superpower is taking a toll on some of its ancient ways. For millennia, people have patterned their lives and diets around the vast fisheries of the East China Sea, but now those waters are increasingly threatened by human-caused, harmful algal blooms that choke off vital fish populations.

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The White Mountain National Forest is home to nearly 140 species of native bees, including two species of native bumble bees that are in decline in the Northeast, according to researchers with the University of New Hampshire who recently completed the first assessment of the state’s native bee population in the national forest.

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Research scientists at Nova Southeastern University (NSU) have been studying the genetics of great white and great hammerhead sharks, and their work brings us a few steps closer to understanding – from a genetic sense – why sharks exhibit some characteristics that are highly desirable by humans (specifically, rapid wound healing and possible higher resistance to cancers.)

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Where did the materials that make up the Earth and moon come from—and when did they arrive?

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Changes in the diets of the super-sized megafauna that ruled Australia during the last Ice Age indicate that climate change was a major factor in their extinction.

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The researchers found that insects engage in the largest continental migration on earth. Some 3.5 trillion insects in Southern Britain alone migrate each year – a biomass eight times that of bird migration.