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Aug 25, 2021

New method greatly improves X-ray nanotomography resolution

Posted by in categories: computing, information science, neuroscience, particle physics

It’s been a truth for a long time: if you want to study the movement and behavior of single atoms, electron microscopy can give you what X-rays can’t. X-rays are good at penetrating into samples—they allow you to see what happens inside batteries as they charge and discharge, for example—but historically they have not been able to spatially image with the same precision electrons can.

But scientists are working to improve the image resolution of X-ray techniques. One such method is X-ray tomography, which enables non-invasive imaging of the inside of materials. If you want to map the intricacies of a microcircuit, for example, or trace the neurons in a brain without destroying the material you are looking at, you need X-ray tomography, and the better the resolution, the smaller the phenomena you can trace with the X-ray beam.

To that end, a group of scientists led by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory has created a new method for improving the resolution of hard X-ray nanotomography. (Nanotomography is X-ray imaging on the scale of nanometers. For comparison, an average human hair is 100,000 nanometers wide.) The team constructed a high-resolution X-ray microscope using the powerful X-ray beams of the Advanced Photon Source (APS) and created new computer algorithms to compensate for issues encountered at tiny scales. Using this method, the team achieved a resolution below 10 nanometers.

Aug 25, 2021

Direct observation of ultrafast hydrogen bond strengthening in liquid water

Posted by in category: futurism

Liquid ultrafast electron scattering measures structural responses in liquid water with femtosecond temporal and atomic spatial resolution to reveal a transient hydrogen bond contraction then thermalization preceding relaxation of the OH stretch.

Aug 25, 2021

Being You

Posted by in category: neuroscience

Our world and the self are constructions of the brain, a pioneering neuroscientist argues.

Aug 25, 2021

Alphabet’s drones delivered 10,000 cups of coffee and 1,200 roast chickens in the last year

Posted by in categories: drones, food

Alphabet’s Wing drone company allows users to order items such as food through a mobile app and is fast approaching 100,000 deliveries since its launch.


Alphabet’s drone company Wing delivered 10,000 cups of coffee, 1,700 snack packs and 1,200 roast chickens to customers in Logan, Australia, over the last year, the company said Wednesday in a blog post outlining its progress.

Wing was initially launched in 2019 in Australia, following a series of drone tests that began in 2014. The service, which was initially part of Alphabet’s experimental research division, allows users to order items such as food through a mobile app and is fast approaching 100,000 deliveries since its launch.

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Aug 25, 2021

Berries may lower blood pressure with help from gut bacteria

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, food

Research indicates that flavonoids may protect against: high blood pressureTrusted Source heart attack and stroke type 2 diabetesTrusted Source certain types of cancer-medicalnewstoday.com


New research finds that people who consume foods high in flavonoids, such as berries, apples, and pears, have lower blood pressure than those who do not.

Aug 25, 2021

Lucy: NASA mission to primordial asteroids may explain 2 cosmic mysteries

Posted by in category: space

During an upcoming NASA mission, currently scheduled for an October lift-off, a spacecraft called Lucy will be the first to visit a fleet of primordial bodies trailing behind Jupiter. It will launch on the Atlas V 401 rocket.


The Lucy mission will be the first to explore the Trojan asteroids, a large group of asteroids that share Jupiter’s orbit around the Sun.

Aug 25, 2021

These Scientists Added A Human Fat Gene To Potatoes — And They Are Growing To Huge Proportions

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, genetics

Okay, maybe not as big as the one in the picture.

Potatoes are my favorite vegetable; you can turn them into fries, bake them for an exquisite dish or mash them and eat them as a side dish. There are endless possibilities to cook a potato and what can be better than adding human fat gene in them to make them bigger and juicier?

Scientists have been experimenting with growing larger crops and it seems like they found the perfect solution; adding the human gene related to obesity and fat mass into the plants to yield super crops. The potato plants were inserted with a fat-regulating protein called FTO which changed the genetic code into producing extra proteins which resulted in large potatoes that were almost twice the size of regular ones grown from the same plant crop. “It [was] really a bold and bizarre idea. To be honest, we were probably expecting some catastrophic effects,” said Chuan He, a chemist at University of Chicago.

Aug 25, 2021

A longevity expert shares the diet, exercise and sleep rules he lives

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension

Longevity expert Sergey Young has spent his career gathering insights from health researchers, doctors and dietitians about how to live a longer and stronger life. He shares his top health rules, including his diet, exercise routine and how much sleep he gets.

Aug 25, 2021

Scientists use lasers to create miniature supernova shock waves on Earth

Posted by in categories: cosmology, particle physics

Circa 2020 o.o!


Researchers have created a miniature version of supernova shock waves in a lab here on Earth to solve a long-standing cosmic mystery.

When stars die and explode in supernovas, they create shock waves that emanate across the surrounding plasma. These powerful shock waves blast out cosmic rays, or highly energetic particles, out into the universe. The waves act almost like particle accelerators, pushing these particles out so fast that they approach the speed of light. However, scientists have yet to fully understand exactly how and why the shock waves accelerate these particles.

Aug 25, 2021

Electric polarization and nonlinear optical effects in noncentrosymmetric magnets

Posted by in category: materials

Magnetic excitations in multiferroic materials accompany electric polarization, known as electromagnons. The authors develop here a general framework to study electric polarization and nonlinear optical responses of noncentrosymmetric magnets based on spin models. They theoretically demonstrate the optical excitation of electromagnon-induced dc current generation (i.e., a photovoltaic effect) from the so-called shift current mechanism.