Popular Science

It has created a computer algorithm that can model and catalog all molecules lightweight, carbon-based, it would be feasible to create chemicals in the laboratory. This universe of small molecules covers a number of chemical structures that is written with a “1″ followed by 60 zeros. Many of the problems of humanity have their molecular solutions in this chemical universe from the cure of a disease to a new material to capture sunlight more effectively than has been achieved so far.

Since this chemical universe has an astronomical size, as scientists seek new molecular solutions, do not know what “direction” looks.

To provide researchers in synthetic chemistry aid in your search molecular, the team of David Beratan, Weitao Yang, Aaron Virshup and Julia Contreras-Garcia, of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and Peter Wipf at the University of Pittsburgh, both institutions in the United States, designed a new computer algorithm to map the universe of small molecules. Read the rest of this entry »

Using light, a team of researchers have manipulated the quantum state of an atom-sized defect (specifically a nitrogen-vacancy center) in a diamond structure. The method not only allows more unified than provided by conventional processes, but is more versatile and opens the possibility of exploring new solid-state quantum systems.

Unlike what is done in conventional electronics, the physical equipment and electronic engineer David Awschalom, director of the Center for Spintronics and Quantum Computation, University of California at Santa Barbara, developed an all-optical system for controlling semiconductor single quantum bits, using pulses of light. Read the rest of this entry »

A contact lens fall on the floor of the bathroom, a hamster that has escaped into the yard, a car key drop in gravel ground: how the brain goes to work when we need maximum attention possible visual to find small things in a very little of that stand? It is a kind of search for the most extreme and famous example is to find the needle in a haystack.

New research shows that when we embarked on a search of this kind, several visual and non-visual regions of the brain are put to work at full capacity to locate a person, animal or thing.

Our brain is configured to devote considerable resources to this type of search. That means that if we are looking for a child lost in a crowd, areas of the brain that normally are dedicated to recognize other objects, such as animals, or even the areas that govern abstract thinking, temporarily leave their usual functions and bind to the search party. Thus, the brain goes with remarkable speed to searching, very attentive to a child, in the case of the example, and redirects resources to this task that normally used for other mental tasks. Read the rest of this entry »

In a fight between fish of the same species, the largest contender is not always wins. This has been proven in new research on the importance for survival have personality traits like courage resulted in a more aggressive and less likely to surrender to an opponent that is initially higher.

Scientists at the University of Exeter in the UK and A & M University of Texas, College Station, USA, have found that when certain fish fighting for food, often is personality, not the size, which determines Who will emerge victorious.

The finding suggests that when resources are scarce, personality traits such as aggression or anger may be more important for survival than physical strength. Read the rest of this entry »

After various data analysis, it was verified that the 9th of May, the average daily concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over the monitoring station at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, exceeded 400 ppm (parts per million) by first time since measurements began in 1958. Since CO2 emissions to the atmosphere continue apace, there is no reason to believe that this measure is a rarity unrepeatable, but it seems that we have just witnessed the first step in establishing unequivocal 400 parts per million as normal value and the new global mean concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere.

Independent measurements made by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the United States (NOAA) and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, part of the University of California at San Diego, have been attuned to this level for those dates. This marks an important milestone because Mauna Loa station, to be systematic monitoring station carbon dioxide (CO2) with the longest series of measurements in the world, is the leading global point of reference on the evolution in the last decades of the atmospheric concentration of this potent greenhouse gas. Read the rest of this entry »

The widespread use of antibiotics in both humans and cattle carries the wastewater to be carrying traces of antibiotics, among other substances from humans and animals. The presence of antibiotics in surface water is harmful because it can kill microorganisms that are useful for aquatic ecosystems while forging drug-resistant pathogenic bacteria.

In addition, it can also affect the endocrine system of fish, birds and other wildlife. In short, the most common problem caused by the presence of antibiotics is that the health of ecosystems in streams and lakes deteriorates.

The team of environmental engineers Vikram Kapoor and David Wendell, of the University of Cincinnati in the United States, has devised a way to use protein energized by sunlight to filter harmful antibiotics and other compounds in rivers and lakes with efficiency significantly greater than the conventional treatments. Read the rest of this entry »

How to use a hand that has no nerves, unable to perceive what is holding a hand, for example, a can of soda rises to its lips to drink from it but inadvertently squeezed in the process, pouring the drink by the ground? That’s the problem they have traditionally faced robots hands. Various solutions have been implemented, but they are not cheap.

A team of scientists at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, has developed a very cheap touch sensor for robotic hands that is sensitive enough to convert a crude machine a skilled manipulator tool.

Designed by the team of Leif Jentoft and Yaroslav Tenzer, Biorobotics Laboratory at SEAS, the sensor, called TakkTile, can make available to the commercial sector inventors, teachers and robotics enthusiasts something that normally would be technology. Read the rest of this entry »

Disposing of batteries capable of delivering more power, it could increase the range of electric cars, and thereby enable them to cope with long journeys as they can make cars with a combustion engine. A new nanomaterial for lithium-ion batteries could achieve this.

The use of rechargeable lithium-ion battery is now widespread. The batteries provide power to such machines as varied as electric cars to smartphones, these batteries are the preferred storage media when you need to provide a lot of energy occupying a small space and weigh little. At present, scientists from all over the world are working on developing a new generation of such batteries, which will be marked by significant improvements in performance.

Maksym Kovalenko team from the Laboratory of Inorganic Chemistry at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (also known as ETH Zurich) and the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Science and Technology of Materials (EMPA, also known as Institute EMPA) has now developed a nanomaterial which enables you to store much more energy in lithium-ion batteries. Read the rest of this entry »

A team of researchers led by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) in Spain has managed to get tomatoes, seeded and with a high content of carotenoids and antioxidant components from unfertilized ovaries. The work has been published in Plant Biotechnology Journal.

In most plant species, the transition from flower to fruit does not occur in the absence of fertilization. However, under certain conditions, there is a possibility to occur by another process called parthenocarpy.

“Blocking genetically engineered the early development of the stamens, the male sex organs of angiosperm plants; we generated tomato plants with male sterility. The ovaries of these plants develop without fertilization, which results or parthenocarpic seedless fruit”, says Concha Gomez-Mena, CSIC researcher at the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology of Plants (joint CSIC and the University Politecnica de Valencia). Read the rest of this entry »

An international team of the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, on the French-Swiss border, has shown that some atomic nuclei can buy exotic boules forms beyond the traditional.

It was already known that most of the nuclei that exist in nature have shaped ‘rugby ball’ in its ground state. According to a new study, published this week in Nature, some others with numbers of protons and neutrons manage to acquire concrete-shaped ‘pear’. Although this had been predicted theoretically, so far there was no sufficient experimental evidence.

According to modern theories which describe the dynamics nuclear, the shape of the atomic nucleus is determined by the number of protons and neutrons that compose it, as well as the interactions between these particles. In its ground state nuclei tend to be spherical when the number of protons and/or neutrons is close to the so-called ‘magic numbers’. Read the rest of this entry »