When the words "artificial intelligence" (AI) come to mind, your first thoughts may be of super-smart computers, or robots that perform tasks without needing any help from humans. Now, a multi-institutional team including researchers from the National Institute of...
Since element 99 -- einsteinium -- was discovered in 1952 at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) from the debris of the first hydrogen bomb, scientists have performed very few experiments with it because it...
Researchers at UCLA and Columbia University have developed a novel method for tracking the activity of small molecules in the brain, including the neurotransmitters serotonin and dopamine. Pairing tiny artificial receptors with semiconductor devices that are able to function...
With the ability to leech heavy metals from the environment and digest a potent greenhouse gas, methanotrophic bacteria pull double duty when it comes to cleaning up the environment.
But before researchers can explore potential conservation applications, they first must...
Radiation nearly always degrades the materials exposed to it, hastening their deterioration and requiring replacement of key components in high-radiation environments such as nuclear reactors. But for certain alloys that could be used in fission or fusion reactors, the...
Using a nanopore, researchers have demonstrated the potential to reduce the time required for sequencing a glycosaminoglycan—a class of long chain-linked sugar molecules as important to our biology as DNA—from years to minutes.
As published this week in the Proceedings of...
Since the 1970s, chemicals called brominated flame retardants (BFRs) have been added to a host of consumer and household products, ranging from electronics and mattresses to upholstery and carpets. While they were intended to improve fire safety, one form—polybrominated...
As the world's most popular shoe, flip-flops account for a troubling percentage of plastic waste that ends up in landfills, on seashores and in our oceans. Scientists at the University of California San Diego have spent years working to...
What's your favorite color? If you answered blue, you're in good company. Blue outranks all other color preferences worldwide by a large margin.
No matter how much people enjoy looking at it, blue is a difficult color to harness from nature. As...
In collaboration with colleagues from the ETH Zurich, researchers at the University of Bern, Switzerland, have for the first time investigated a substance found in liverwort that resembles THC. The psychoactive substance, which is consumed as a legal high,...
Scientists have engineered an enzyme which can digest some of our most commonly polluting plastics, providing a potential solution to one of the world's biggest environmental problems.
The discovery could result in a recycling solution for millions of tonnes of...
