Talking plants… science fiction?
Science is becoming closer emulating the fiction of the Avatar movie, by deciphering plants' electrical signals to devise new holistic environmental biosensors.
Jan 21, 2014
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Short circuit in molecular switch intensifies pain
While searching for novel painkillers, researchers at KU Leuven in Belgium came to the surprising conclusion that some candidate drugs actually increase pain. In a study published in the journal Nature Chemical Biology, the ...
A novel insight into cardiac function: Development of a new model of spontaneous oscillatory contraction
Researchers have successfully developed a realistic theoretical model that provides a rational explanation for the spontaneous oscillatory contraction (SPOC) of muscle. The findings were published in Physical Review Letters ...
Researchers produce graphene nanoribbons with nanopores for fast DNA sequencing
The instructions for building all of the body's proteins are contained in a person's DNA, a string of chemicals that, if unwound and strung end to end, would form a sentence 3 billion letters long. Each person's sentence ...
Researchers work to squeeze more data from bandwidth in mobile devices
A team of researchers is working on technology that would allow mobile devices to send and receive more data using the same limited amount of bandwidth. The work is supported by a $1.08 million grant from the National Science ...
Counting on neodymium for information processing with magnetic molecules
Magnetic molecules are regarded as promising functional units for the future of information processing. An interdisciplinary team of researchers from Jülich and Aachen were the first to produce particularly robust magnetic ...
Researchers make headway in quantum information transfer via nanomechanical coupling
Fiber optics has made communication faster than ever, but the next step involves a quantum leap –– literally. In order to improve the security of the transfer of information, scientists are working on how to translate ...
Graphene could yield cheaper optical chips
Graphene—which consists of atom-thick sheets of carbon atoms arranged hexagonally—is the new wonder material: Flexible, lightweight and incredibly conductive electrically, it's also the strongest material known to man.
Graphene photodetector integrated into computer chip
The novel material graphene and its technological applications are studied at the Vienna University of Technology. Now scientists succeeded in combining graphene light detectors with semiconductor chips.
Frogs without ears hear with their mouth
Gardiner's frogs from the Seychelles islands, one of the smallest frogs in the world, do not possess a middle ear with an eardrum yet can croak themselves, and hear other frogs. An international team of scientists using X-rays ...
