ScienceDaily: Matter & Energy News

As paint thinner, ink and adhesives dry, they can release volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which can negatively impact health. Typically, one of those VOCs is xylene, which exists as three isomers with the same elements but slightly different arrangements. Because the isomers are so similar, they're hard to monitor separately. Now, researchers have developed an electric nose ('e-nose') with porous metal-organic framework (MOF) films that can accurately distinguish xylene isomer mixtures.

When temperatures fall below freezing, cellphones need to be recharged frequently, and electric cars have shorter driving ranges. This is because their lithium-ion batteries' anodes get sluggish, holding less charge and draining energy quickly. To improve electrical performance in the extreme cold, researchers have replaced the traditional graphite anode in a lithium-ion battery with a bumpy carbon-based material, which maintains its rechargeable storage capacity down to -31 F.

Scientists find that holes can also improve technology, including medical devices. The article describes an entirely new way to make a solar cell: by etching holes in the top layer to make it porous.

Scientists have revealed the effect of temperature on water in protein-ligand interactions, providing a way to produce structures for drug discovery that are less biased by freezing artifacts.

Owing to their unique permeable, hollow shell structures with inner, movable cores, yolk-shell nanocrystals are suitable for a wide variety of applications. Yolk-shell nanocrystals consisting of a gold core with various semiconductor shells have been developed using a novel sequential ion-exchange process. These metal-semiconductor yolk-shell nanocrystals can serve as highly effective photocatalysts for many applications.

As people across the globe look forward to longer life expectancies, malignant cancers continue to pose threats to human health. The exploration and development of immunotherapy aims to seek new breakthroughs for the treatment of solid tumors. Although immune checkpoint-based immunotherapy has been shown to have great potential, only a small proportion of patients fully respond to this therapy, and the relevant molecular mechanisms need to be further explored. This delivery method is however complex and inefficient. In a breakthrough development, a team of scientists has formulated a novel vaccine which showed high efficacy in the treatment of solid tumors, achieving complete clearance of solid tumors and inducing long-lasting immune memory. This prevents the relapse of tumor growth that the patient originally presented with and provides immunity against similar tumour types. This was shown through the application of this vaccine on melanoma tumor models.

Researchers succeed in increasing the prediction accuracy of the battery capacity by up to 20% by merging physical domain knowledge with AI.

Researchers describe a new way to evaluate rankings. Their goal is not to find one true hierarchy, but to calculate the spread of all possible hierarchies, with each one weighted by its probability.

Researchers have developed a tiny sensor for detecting pesticides on fruit in just a few minutes. The technique uses flame-sprayed nanoparticles made from silver to increase the signal of chemicals. While still at an early stage, the researchers hope these nano-sensors could help uncover food pesticides before consumption.

The numerous casualties of bats at wind turbines (WT) have a negative impact on the populations of affected species and potentially far-reaching consequences for the biodiversity in rural areas. Until now, it could only be assumed that the death of bats had further consequences. Now, a team of scientists show that natural food chains are interrupted, which can have far-reaching negative consequences for agriculture and forestry. The study demonstrates the extent to which the functional importance of bats for habitats has been underestimated so far.

A new synthesis method offers hope for creation of advance mRNA vaccines to fight viruses and even cancers.

A team of physicists has found a way to operate mass manufacturable photonic sensors at the quantum limit. This breakthrough paves the way for practical applications such as monitoring greenhouse gases and cancer detection.

Researchers have improved the coherence time of a previously developed quantum membrane dramatically. The improvement will expand the usability of the membrane for a variety of different purposes. With a coherence time of one hundred milliseconds, the membrane can for example store sensitive quantum information for further processing in a quantum computer or network.

Poultry is responsible for more than one out of every five cases of salmonella infection in the U.S. But traditional methods of testing the chicken you grab off the grocery shelf may not be enough to detect all strains of the bacteria, according to new research.

Clouds of ultralight particles can form around rotating black holes. A team of physicists now show that these clouds would leave a characteristic imprint on the gravitational waves emitted by binary black holes.

Devices made of readily available oxide and carbon-based materials can produce clean hydrogen from water over weeks -- according to new research. The findings could help overcome one of the key issues in solar fuel production, where current earth-abundant light-absorbing materials are limited through either their performance or stability.

Recent efforts have sought to make low-boom supersonic aircraft, but noise issues due to sonic booms may become more pronounced in cities, where buildings form canyons that distort the booms. Researchers conducted simulations comparing how sonic booms reflect differently over a single building, two neighboring buildings, and multiple buildings spaced at regular intervals. The researchers found the wider the streets compared to the height of buildings, the less booms are affected. Narrower streets introduced more complex boom propagation.

Researchers carefully studied bubbles that form when water droplets come into contact with heated cooking oil and found that the type and number of bubbles formed depends on the amount of water absorbed by the chopsticks as well as the chopstick material. The water droplet explodes when it hit the hot oil, in three types of bubble events: an explosion cavity, an elongated cavity, and an oscillating cavity.

Aptamers are single-stranded oligonucleotides generated by the systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment (SELEX). They have a wide variety of applications, but computational approaches are necessary to efficiently identify candidate aptamers. A team of researchers has now developed RaptGen, a variational autoencoder that efficiently discovers new aptamers not included in the input SELEX dataset. This novel computational model could one day be the standard method for aptamer generation.

Over the last few decades, researchers have built minuscule molecular machines that rotate or shuttle other molecules. However, it's difficult to determine the mechanical work and forces that these tiny contraptions produce, which is important when using them as nanorobots or in artificial muscles. Now researchers report molecular motors that twist and untwist like whirligig toys -- enabling the measurement of the energy and torque of their rotations.

Researchers explain the distinctive low-temperature thermal properties of glasses using molecular dynamics simulations. By focusing on string-like defects, they were able to create a unified explanation, which may assist in glass applications.

Researchers in Australia have been able to use trace amounts of liquid platinum to create cheap and highly efficient chemical reactions at low temperatures, opening a pathway to dramatic emissions reductions in crucial industries.

Sepsis, the body's overreaction to an infection, affects more than 1.5 million people and kills at least 270,000 every year in the U.S. alone. The standard treatment of antibiotics and fluids is not effective for many patients, and those who survive face a higher risk of death. Researchers have reported a new nanoparticle-based treatment that delivers anti-inflammatory molecules and antibiotics.

Researchers have revealed a new beam-steering antenna that increases the efficiency of data transmission, and opens up frequencies for mobile communications that are inaccessible to currently used technologies. The technology has demonstrated vast improvements in data transmission efficiency at frequencies ranging across the millimeter wave spectrum, specifically those identified for 5G (mmWave) and 6G, where high efficiency is currently only achievable using slow, mechanically steered antenna solutions.

Development of metamemory in AI system allows it to adjust its understanding based on what it already knows, learning and evolving based on its environment as humans do.

Researchers have developed a new technology to help surgeons know where a patient's nerves are, lessening the chance of nerve damage.