ScienceDaily: Top Technology News

A revolutionary pacemaker that re-establishes the heart's naturally irregular beat is set to be trialled in New Zealand heart patients this year.

Research inspired by Terminator 2's shape-shifting, liquid metal robot sees liquid-metal electrical conductors manipulated in mid-air without contact. The liquid wires can be controlled to move in any direction, and manipulated into unique, levitated shapes such as loops and squares using a small 'triggering' voltage and a magnet. The new technology has potential application in advanced manufacturing and dynamic electronic structures, augmenting other non-contact manipulation technologies such as acoustics or optical tweezers.

During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, a research team went looking for and found a way to make standard surgical masks better at keeping out small airborne droplets that might contain the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Mechanical hearts spur some regeneration in dormant parts of failing hearts, according to a pilot study that shows promise for developing regenerative heart therapies.

Skyrmions, tiny magnetic anomalies that arise in two-dimensional materials, can be used to generate true random numbers useful in cryptography and probabilistic computing.

With the federal government planning to hold the largest sale of offshore wind farm leases in the nation's history, a new study could help inform the development of offshore wind farms by providing detailed models characterizing the frequency, intensity and height of low-level jet streams over the U.S. Atlantic coastal zone.

Nanowires have a unique property: These ultra-thin wires can sustain very high elastic strains without damaging the crystal structure of the material. A team of researchers has now succeeded in experimentally demonstrating that electron mobility in nanowires is remarkably enhanced when the shell places the wire core under tensile strain.

A few years ago, a novel measurement technique showed that protons are probably smaller than had been assumed since the 1990s. The discrepancy surprised the scientific community; some researchers even believed that the Standard Model of particle physics would have to be changed. Physicists have now developed a method that allows them to analyze the results of older and more recent experiments much more comprehensively than before. This also results in a smaller proton radius from the older data. So there is probably no difference between the values - no matter which measurement method they are based on.