ScienceDaily: Matter & Energy News

In a step toward robots that can learn on the fly like humans do, a new approach expands training data sets for robots that work with soft objects like ropes and fabrics, or in cluttered environments.

A new way to safely deliver carbon monoxide to the body might help fight inflammation. Inspired by molecular gastronomy, researchers incorporated carbon monoxide into foams that can be delivered to the digestive tract.

Engineers have created a new type of semiconductor laser that accomplishes an elusive goal in the field of optics: the ability to maintain a single mode of emitted light while maintaining the ability to scale up in size and power. It is an achievement that means size does not have to come at the expense of coherence, enabling lasers to be more powerful and to cover longer distances for many applications.

Researchers explore a basic building block used in the fabrication of many DNA nanoforms. Known as a Holliday junction, this nexus of two segments of double stranded DNA has been used to form elaborate, self-assembling crystal lattices at the nanometer scale, (or roughly 1/75,000th the width of a human hair).

Researchers have found that organic vapor can dissolve molecular salts in a phenomenon known as organic deliquescence. Similar to how water vapor can induce deliquescence of compounds like calcium chloride, this phenomenon will be useful for developing methods for capturing harmful volatile organic compounds (VOCs). There is an urgent need to remove them from indoor environments, particularly industrial facilities, where concentrations are highest.

New research reveals that a factory-calibrated continuous glucose monitor (CGM) may be sufficiently accurate for use by people on dialysis, a group often plagued by dangerous swings in blood-sugar levels.

Sensing with levitated nanoparticles has so far been limited by the precision of position measurements. Now, researchers have demonstrated a new method for optical interferometry in which light scattered by a particle is reflected by a mirror. This opens up new possibilities for using levitated particles as sensors, in particular, in quantum regimes.

FuseBot is a new robotic system that fuses visual information and radio-frequency signals to efficiently find hidden items buried under a pile of objects, whether or not the targeted item has an RFID tag.

The current system of chemical risk assessment is inadequate and underestimates levels of flame retardants and other pollutants needed to cause harmful health effects, according to a recent analysis.

To solve a long-standing puzzle about how long a neutron can 'live' outside an atomic nucleus, physicists entertained a wild but testable theory positing the existence of a right-handed version of our left-handed universe. They designed a mind-bending experiment to try to detect a particle that has been speculated but not spotted. If found, the theorized 'mirror neutron' -- a dark-matter twin to the neutron -- could explain a discrepancy between answers from two types of neutron lifetime experiments and provide the first observation of dark matter.