71628023
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sciencehabit writes:
Weather could power the next generation of smart windows. Researchers have created glass that tints by harvesting energy from wind and precipitation. The approach offers an alternative to other smart windows powered by batteries, solar panels, and even standard power outlets. The new glass uses nanosized generators powered by triboelectrics—the static electricity produced by friction when two materials touch. When activated, the generators, which rest in two layers atop a single pane of glass, create an electric current that tints the clear window a dark shade of blue.
71626023
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sciencehabit writes:
Scientists have discovered the first "living crystal" formed by a microbe—the speedy Thiovulum majus, one of the fastest swimming species of bacteria known. These bacteria live in the muddy bottoms of salt marshes and produce energy by oxidizing sulfide. Researchers discovered that when the bacteria hit the edge of a container, they move along its surface and eventually aggregate into ordered, 2D formations. The microbes generate a tornadolike flow with their spinning flagella, which pull nearby bacteria toward them, causing them to arrange in crystalline clump. Whereas most crystals are inert structures, these crystals rearrange and rotate over time (video), thanks to the forces each bacterium exerts on its neighbors
71541815
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sciencehabit writes:
Most open-access (OA) journals make money by making authors pay an article processing charge to publish a paper. A small online malaria journal based in the Netherlands wants to turn that situation on its head. It is promising to pay authors €150 for every article it publishes from now on. The idea behind the move—possible thanks to a Dutch funding agency—is not only to lure authors to the journal, but also to drive home the message that academic publishing is way too expensive, says the journal's editor.
71539373
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sciencehabit writes:
Researchers report the creation of an ultrathin, fabric circuit that keeps high conductivity even while bending and stretching as much as yoga pants. The fiber’s core mimics spandex, consisting of an elastic synthetic thread—polyurethane—twinned by two cotton yarns. These stretchy strings were then dipped in silver nanoparticles to instill conductivity and then liquid silicone to encase everything. This silver nanoyarn could stretch as much as spandex—500% of its original length—and retain a high conductivity (688 siemens per centimeter), the team reports online this month in ACS Nano. That’s 34 times the conductivity and five times the flexibility seen with prior attempts at nanowires made from graphene. The fibers kept high conductivity after being bent 1000 times or wrapped around fingers. The team used their yarn to link light-emitting diodes within foldable plastic, meaning the fibers might serve as flexible wiring in new-age curved TVs, stretchable digital screens, or electronic clothing.
71537963
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sciencehabit writes:
When North Carolina was a wet, tropical swamp some 231 million years ago, the top of the food chain was occupied by a nearly 3-meter-tall crocodilian ancestor that walked on its hind legs and ate the relatives of early mammals, say paleontologists writing on 19 March in Scientific Reports. The newly analyzed fossil represents one of the earliest examples of crocodylomorphs, a group of crocodilelike animals who ruled Earth in the Late Triassic. This "Carolina Butcher" vied with theropod dinosaurs for top predator slots and succeeded—for a time. By the end-Triassic extinction event, some 201.3 million years ago, only their smaller cousins remained, allowing dinosaurs to take over as top predators for the next 135 million years.
71513131
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sciencehabit writes:
Blind rodents on the run from knife-wielding farmers’ wives may never need to ask for directions again. Scientists have gifted navigational skills to blind rats by wiring them with a compass that sends electric signals to their brain when they’re facing north or south. The advance helps shed light on how the brain processes sensory information and could lead to new technologies to help blind people navigate.
71482539
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sciencehabit writes:
Scientists have developed a simple, bootlike exoskeleton that can boost a walker's efficiency without any external power source. The gadget consists of a spring that runs up the back of the calf to a clutch, which releases when the foot lifts off the ground. The spring takes some of the work away from the calf muscles, and the clutch allows the leg to move freely when in the air. The contraption reduced the cost of walking by 7%, compared with walking without assistance. The device is lighter than powered devices, weighing about half a kilogram (1.1 pounds), and the performance boost is comparable.
71424365
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sciencehabit writes:
As Arctic sea ice melts earlier each year, polar bears in some parts of Norway and Greenland are abandoning ice floes for dry land and their favorite meal—seals—for seabird eggs. The shift in diet could sound a death knell for popular nesting grounds of barnacle geese, eider ducks, and glaucous gulls, researchers warn this month in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution. Calling the results the “cascading effects of climate change,” the team of European researchers found that over the course of the past 10 years, dramatic increases in summertime nest predation correlated with diminishing sea ice coverage in the Arctic Ocean. Their research combined NASA satellite imagery with on-the-ground observations at one seabird nesting site in northeast Greenland and four in the Svalbard archipelago of Norway. One scientist observed polar bears eating more than 200 eggs in 2 hours, and last year no chicks or eggs of any species—barnacle geese, eiders, and glaucous gulls—survived.
71423065
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sciencehabit writes:
Stark and rising inequality plagues many countries, including the United States, and politicians, economists, and—fortunately—scientists, are debating its causes and solutions. But inequality’s effects may go beyond simple access to opportunity: a new study finds that family differences in income and education are directly correlated with brain size in developing children and adolescents. The findings could have important policy implications and provide new arguments for early antipoverty interventions, researchers say.
71338885
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sciencehabit writes:
Seven thousand, five hundred years ago in Italy, early farmers practiced an unusual burial ritual known as “defleshing.” When people died, villagers stripped their bones bare, pulled them apart, and mingled them with animal remains in a nearby cave. The practice was meant to separate the dead from the living, researchers say, writing in the latest issue of the journal Antiquity.
71334985
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sciencehabit writes:
In 2005, three computer science Ph.D. students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created a program to generate nonsensical computer science research papers. The goal was “to expose the lack of peer review at low-quality conferences that essentially scam researchers with publication and conference fees.” The program—dubbed SCIgen—soon found users across the globe, and before long its automatically generated creations were being accepted by scientific conferences and published in purportedly peer-reviewed journals. But SCIgen may have finally met its match. Academic publisher Springer this week is releasing SciDetect, an open-source program to automatically detect automatically generated papers. SCIgen uses a “context-free grammar” to create word salad that looks like reasonable text from a distance but is easily spotted as nonsense by a human reader
71281631
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sciencehabit writes:
Think of it as solar wind on steroids. Powerful gales from supermassive black holes in the center of galaxies can blast gas and other raw materials right out of the galaxy, robbing it of the raw materials needed to make new stars, a new study suggests. The new findings should help astronomers refine their models of how galaxies evolve, the researchers say.
71281621
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sciencehabit writes:
If you zoom in on a snowflake, you'll see its six-sided symmetry mirrored at the molecular level. As water freezes, its molecules typically arrange themselves in a repeating pattern of hexagons, the geometry that forms the snowflake's star-shaped structure. Now, scientists have created a new type of ice they call "square ice," which forms a cube-shaped pattern instead, with water molecules arranged in neatly aligned rows. The result could be useful for understanding the movement of water when squeezed inside tiny channels, for instance, in carbon nanotubes or cell membranes. And if these crystals formed on a larger scale, they would make square snowflakes, instead of six-sided ones.
71281587
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sciencehabit writes:
Bad news for any slackers on Saturn: The days on the ringed planet are shorter than the number you'll find in most books—6 minutes briefer, to be exact. The faster spin drastically changes how scientists think Saturn's winds blow.
71281579
submission
sciencehabit writes:
Today researchers unveiled the largest ever set of full genomes from a single population: Iceland. The massive project, carried out by a private company in the country, deCODE genetics, has yielded new disease risk genes, insights into human evolution, and a list of more than 1000 genes that people can apparently live without. The project also serves as a model for other countries’ efforts to sequence their people’s DNA for research on personalized medical care, says study leader Kári Stefánsson, deCODE’s CEO. For example, the United States is planning to sequence the genomes of 1 million Americans over the next few years and use the data to devise individualized treatments.
