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More powerful batteries could help electric cars achieve a considerably larger range and thus a breakthrough on the market. A new nanomaterial for lithium ion batteries developed in the labs of chemists at ETH Zurich and Empa could come into play here. They provide power for electric cars, electric bicycles, smartphones and laptops; nowadays, rechargeable lithium ion batteries are the storage media of choice when it comes to supplying a large amount of energy in a small space and light weight....

Valerian is a pink flowering bush with pale pink flowers and a floral scent that is even used in perfumes. The roots of this plant have been used as medicine since ancient Greece [1]. Modern studies have been able to confirm that valerian root benefits people with anxiety, insomnia, ADHD, menstrual symptoms, and menopause. It can also help you combat everyday stress, balance hormones, and improve your quality of sleep....

Ultra-intense lasers with ultra-short pulses and ultra-high energies are powerful tools for exploring unknowns in physics, cosmology, material science, etc. With the help of the famous technology “Chirped Pulse Amplification (CPA)” (2018 Nobel Prize in Physics), the current record has reached 10 Petawatts (or 10^16 Watts). In a study recently published in Scientific Reports, researchers from Osaka University proposed a concept for next-generation ultra-intense lasers with a simulated peak power up to the Exawatt class (1 Exawatt equals 1000 Petawatts)....

Engineers are making strides on the design of four-legged robots and their ability to run, jump and even do backflips. But getting two-legged, humanoid robots to exert force or push against something without falling has been a significant stumbling block. Now engineers at MIT and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed a method to control balance in a two-legged, teleoperated robot — an essential step toward enabling a humanoid to carry out high-impact tasks in challenging environments....

A recent study provides new insights into the history of rodent species on Hispaniola. Scientists from the Florida Museum of Natural History and the Museo Nacional de Historia Natural in the Dominican Republic conducted carbon-dating on the fossils of six hutia species, which are related to capybaras and resemble a combination of a squirrel and a beaver. They also studied thousands of bones previously collected over 40 years and stored at the Florida Museum of Natural History, searching for similarities that may shed light on the recent wave of rodent extinctions....

Such stars are known as “blue stragglers,” because they appear to “straggle” behind the natural evolution of most stars in a star cluster: They still resemble extremely hot (and therefore blue) young stars. Using the Hubble Space Telescope, an international research team led by Dr. DENG Licai from the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) detected an unexpected population of blue straggler stars in a young “globular” cluster, known by its catalog number “NGC 2173....

The giant star, named π1 Gruis, is one of the stars in the constellation Grus (Latin for the crane, a type of bird), which can be observed in the southern hemisphere. An evolved star in the last major phase of life, π1Gruis is 350 times larger than the Sun and resembles what our Sun will become at the end of its life in five billion years. Studying this star gives scientists insight into the future activity, characteristics, and appearance of the Sun....

VIMOS — or, in full, the VIsible Multi-Object Spectrograph — was active on the VLT for an impressive 16 years. During that time it helped scientists to uncover the wild early lives of massive galaxies, observe awe-inspiring triple-galaxy interactions, and explore deep cosmic questions such as how the Universe’s most massive galaxies grew so large. Instead of focusing on single objects, VIMOS was able to capture detailed information about hundreds of galaxies at once....

NASA TV will carry live views of the eclipse from approximately 2:15 p.m. EDT (14:15 UTC) until as late as 6:30 p.m. EDT (18:30 UTC).

Although e-cigarettes have been often marketed as a safer alternative to traditional cigarettes, EVALI has emerged as a serious and sometimes fatal complication of vaping. Radiologists play a key role in the evaluation of suspected EVALI. Accurate identification of the condition allows for prompt medical treatment, which may decrease the severity of injury in some patients. “Rapid clinical and/or radiologic recognition of EVALI allows clinicians to treat patients expeditiously and provide supportive care,” said Seth Kligerman, M....

Growing numbers of elderly persons have spinal pain. Although medications are crucial for pain management, geriatric patients cannot utilize them too much due to decreased liver and kidney function, comorbid diseases, and polypharmacy (the simultaneous use of multiple drugs to treat medical conditions). A recent review study has shown that acetaminophen is safe in older adults, but nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (ibuprofen) may be more beneficial for spinal pain. Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories should be used in lower dosage courses for a short period of time with gastrointestinal caution, whereas corticosteroids have the least evidence for treating nonspecific back pain....

Seabirds arrived on the remote cluster of islands in the South Atlantic known as the Falkland Islands 5,000 years ago. Their arrival occurred at the same time as the region cooled. Coincidence? Probably not, according to experts like Dulcinea Groff, whose research interests include paleoecology, paleoclimate, conservation and environmental change. Instead, their arrival suggests that the Falkland Islands were a cold-climate refuge for seabirds. Today, a warming Southern Ocean calls into question the long-term viability of the Falkland Islands as a habitat for seabirds whom Groff calls the “canaries in the coalmine of the ocean and land where they nest” because of their sensitivity to climate change....

A recent study, published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, explored the characteristics of 24 ancient cities in Mexico and discovered that the cities that survived the longest exhibited signs of collective governance, infrastructure investment, and collaboration among households. “For years, my colleagues and I have investigated why and how certain cities maintain their importance or collapse,” says Gary Feinman, the study’s lead author and MacArthur Curator of Anthropology at the Field Museum in Chicago....

A team of researchers from the Berlin Institute of Health at Charité (BIH) together with colleagues from the United Kingdom and Canada have found genes and proteins that contribute to a higher risk of severe COVID-19. Their findings were recently published in Nature Communications. Doctors and scientists around the world are still confused as to why some people become severely ill when infected with SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes the COVID-19 disease), while others experience only mild symptoms....

Our solar system, with its colorful collection of planets, asteroids, and comets, is a fleck in the grander cosmos. Hundreds of billions of solar systems are thought to reside in our Milky Way galaxy, which is itself just a drop in a sea of galaxies. The rarest and largest of galaxy groupings, called galaxy clusters, can be the hardest to find. That’s where NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) can help....

Travel and economic slowdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic combined to put the brakes on shipping, seafloor exploration, and many other human activities in the ocean, creating a unique moment to begin a time-series study of the impacts of sound on marine life. A community of scientists has identified more than 200 non-military ocean hydrophones worldwide and hopes to make the most of the unprecedented opportunity to pool their recorded data into the 2020 quiet ocean assessment and to help monitor the ocean soundscape long into the future....

The award is named for its first recipient, U.S. President Herbert Hoover, who was an engineer by profession. Established in 1929 to honor “great, unselfish, nontechnical services by engineers to humanity,” the award is administered by a board representing five engineering organizations: the American Society of Mechanical Engineers; the American Society of Civil Engineers; the American Institute of Chemical Engineers; the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical and Petroleum Engineers; and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers....

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory are working on replacing these bar magnets with tiny magnetic vortices, known as skyrmions. These vortices, which are as small as billionths of a meter, form in certain magnetic materials and have the potential to bring about a new generation of microelectronics for memory storage in high-performance computers. “The bar magnets in computer memory are like shoelaces tied with a single knot; it takes almost no energy to undo them,” said Arthur McCray, a Northwestern University graduate student working in Argonne’s Materials Science Division (MSD)....

Researchers at Leipzig University Hospital and the Helmholtz Institute for Metabolic, Obesity, and Vascular Research (HI-MAG) at Helmholtz Munich also want to identify the rare cases of monogenic obesity. In these patients, defects in a single gene are the cause of the disease. Those affected often show a decreased sensation of satiety in early childhood and suffer from a constant feeling of hunger. While studying tissue samples from a girl with severe obesity, the Leipzig researchers found that a specific gene, the agouti-signaling protein (ASIP) gene, was produced at high levels in cells where it is not normally present (e....

Physicists have discovered a new way to coat soft robots in materials that allow them to move and function in a more purposeful way. Physicists have discovered a new way to coat soft robots in materials that allow them to move and function in a more purposeful way. The research, led by the University of Bath, is described in a paper published on March 11, 2022, in Science Advances. Authors of the study believe their breakthrough modeling on ‘active matter’ could mark a turning point in the design of robots....