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University of Illinois materials scientists have developed a new reactive silver ink for printing high-performance electronics on ubiquitous, low-cost materials such as flexible plastic, paper or fabric substrates. Jennifer Lewis, the Hans Thurnauer Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, and graduate student S. Brett Walker described the new ink in the Journal of the American [...]

The toothiest prehistoric predators also had beefier arm bones, according to results of a study published today in the journal Paleobiology. Saber-toothed tigers may come to mind, but these extinct cats weren’t the only animals with fearsome fangs. Take the false saber-toothed cats–also known as nimravids–and their catlike cousins, a family of carnivores called the [...]

A study examining the prevalence of the fungus Fusarium in bathroom sink drains suggests that plumbing systems may be a common source of human infections. In the first extensive survey of its kind, researchers in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences sampled nearly 500 bathroom sink drains from 131 buildings — businesses, homes, university dormitories [...]

An essential question confronting neuroscientists and computer vision researchers alike is how objects can be identified by simply “looking” at an image. Introspectively, we know that the human brain solves this problem very well. We only have to look at something to know what it is. But teaching a computer to “know” what it’s looking [...]

A discovery in fruit flies may be able to tell us more about how animals, including humans, sense potentially dangerous discomforts. Researchers at Duke University Medical Center uncovered naturally occurring variations of a gene named TRPA1 that is important for the function of pain-sensing neurons throughout the animal kingdom. The gene makes an ion channel, [...]

Approximately 80,000 industrial chemicals are in use and about 700 new chemicals are introduced to commerce each year in the United States, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. To assess human health risks from exposure to harmful substances, James Englehardt, professor in the College of Engineering at the University of Miami, is proposing a [...]

It took former Rice University graduate student Jennie Kuzdzal-Fick a long time to confirm it, but now she knows: Cheaters may win the battle but are destined to lose the war. During her Ph.D. studies at Rice, the evolutionary biologist confirmed through a painstaking process that single-cell amoeba called Dicytostelium discoidium bred to cheat on their own [...]

UCLA physicists have made nanomechanical measurements of unprecedented resolution on protein molecules. The new measurements, by UCLA physics professor Giovanni Zocchi and former UCLA physics graduate student Yong Wang, are approximately 100 times higher in resolution than previous mechanical measurements, a nanotechnology feat which reveals an isolated protein molecule, surprisingly, is neither a solid nor [...]

A repository developed by Duke University engineers that they call a “materials genome” will allow scientists to stop using trail-and-error methods for combining electricity-producing materials called “thermoelectrics.”
Thermoelectri…

The surprising discovery of a new way to tune and enhance thermal conductivity — a basic property generally considered to be fixed for a given material — gives engineers a new tool for managing thermal effects in smart phones and computers, laser…

Imprinting electronic circuitry on backplanes that are both flexible and stretchable promises to revolutionize a number of industries and make “smart devices” nearly ubiquitous. Among the applications that have been envisioned are electronic pads that could be folded away like paper, coatings that could monitor surfaces for cracks and other structural failures, medical bandages that [...]

Imprinting electronic circuitry on backplanes that are both flexible and stretchable promises to revolutionize a number of industries and make “smart devices” nearly ubiquitous. Among the applications that have been envisioned are electronic pads that …

New research published today in the journal Science suggests it may be possible to use brain technology to learn to play a piano, reduce mental stress or hit a curve ball with little or no conscious effort. It’s the kind of thing seen in Hollywood’s “M…

The eel-like body and scrawny “limbs” of the African lungfish would appear to make it an unlikely innovator for locomotion. But its improbable walking behavior, newly described by University of Chicago scientists, redraws the evolutionary route of life…

Troy, N.Y. — Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed a new method to design antibodies aimed at combating disease. The surprisingly simple process was used to make antibodies that neutralize the harmful protein particles that …

By studying the behavior of tiny particles at an interface between oil and water, researchers at Harvard have discovered that stabilized emulsions may take longer to reach equilibrium than previously thought. Much longer, in fact.
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Three different disease-causing viruses — poliovirus, coxsackievirus, and hepatitis C — rely on their unwilling host for the membrane platforms enriched in a specific lipid, phosphatidylinositol 4 phosphate (PI4P) on which they can replicate, Rutgers…

Material chemists and engineers would love to figure out how to create self-assembling shells, containers or structures that could be used as tiny drug-carrying containers or to build 3-D sensors and electronic de…

When RNA component units called ribonucleotides become embedded in genomic DNA, which contains the complete genetic data for an organism, they can cause problems for cells. It is known that ribonucleotides in DNA can potentially distort the DNA double helix, resulting in genomic instability and altered DNA metabolism, but not much is known about the [...]

A new species of horned dinosaur was announced today by an international team of scientists, nearly 100 years after the initial discovery of the fossil.
The animal, named Spinops sternbergorum, lived approximately 76…