News by Subject Chemistry & Physics

The authors developed and analytically validated a new droplet digital PCR -based assay for HPV16 circulating tumor DNA

A research team in the Korea Institute of Science and Technology(KIST) has announced the development of a thermal-imaging sensor that overcomes the existing problems of price and operating-temperature limitations. The sensor developed in this work can operate at temperatures upto 100 °C without a cooling device and is expected to be more affordable than standard sensors on the market, which would in turn pave the way for its application to smartphones and autonomous vehicles.

Tokyo, Japan - Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have developed a new technology which allows non-contact manipulation of small objects using sound waves. They used a hemispherical array of ultrasound transducers to generate a 3D acoustic fields which stably trapped and lifted a small polystyrene ball from a reflective surface. Although their technique employs a method similar to laser trapping in biology, adaptable to a wider range of particle sizes and materials.

Long thought of as a generic alarm system, the locus coeruleus may actually be a sophisticated regulator of learning and behavior, according to a new review by MIT researchers. They will test this hypothesis with a new grant.

As reported in Advanced Photonics, researchers from Shanghai University and Fudan University developed a general framework and metadevices for achieving dynamic control of THz wavefronts. Instead of locally controlling the individual meta-atoms in a THz metasurface (e.g., via PIN diode, varactor, etc.), they vary the polarization of a light beam with rotating multilayer cascaded metasurfaces.

A phenomenon known from quantum systems could now make its way into biology: In a new study published in Physical Review X, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPI-DS) in Goettingen show that the notion of topological protection can also apply to biochemical networks. The model which the scientists developed makes the topological toolbox, typically used only to describe quantum systems, now also available to biology.