Monthly Archives: November 2017

Many marvel at the immense computing power available in modern day wearable devices. However, few appreciate the many sensors that work together in these devices. Wearable electronics contain many sensors that continually collect data. Picture a smartwatch or personal health monitor. It is the collaboration between different sensors that differentiate a step that you take with your feet from everyday general movements. The sophistication behind interpreting the sensors’ output to provide useful information is truly astounding. Google Glass, a smart pair of eyeglasses, contains many software-based and hardware-based sensors including accelerometers, geomagnetic sensors,  and gyroscopes. The data from the different sensors is combined, in real-time, to interpret the wearer’s actions. This process of combining of data collected from different sources is called data fusion. Wearable microprocessors provide the computing power for the complex computations in data fusion. New developments  in multi-sensor fusion allow Google Glass wearers to control a humanoid…

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When life gives you lemons, sell them and buy a pineapple. Davin Turney couldn’t have put it any better. The versatile pineapple is a powerhouse of nutrients, and even its rugged skin and leaves have found applications ranging from renewable energy to vegan fabrics. You may want to think twice before consigning the skin to the wastebasket, because it may very well make its way back to your home—in the form of a biodegradable nursery pot Thailand is the fourth largest producer and exporter of pineapples in the world, and for years, scientists have sought to achieve a healthy balance between the country’s economic growth and carbon footprint. Their innovative use of pineapple waste to make biodegradable pots serves a threefold purpose: recycle pineapple waste generated by food processing industries, eliminate the use of plastics as plant nursery bags, and naturally fertilize soil with nutrients derived from pineapple waste. The…

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A normal pregnancy usually lasts around 40 weeks, but births that occur before 37 weeks are defined as being premature. Premature births are associated with a wide range of problems in infant children, and generally, the shorter the term of a pregnancy, the greater the health problems there will be for the infant. In fact, individuals that are born extremely premature (at less than 28 weeks of pregnancy) have the highest risk for many health issues, such as anemia, chronic lung disease, and serious infections.  Currently, premature births are the leading cause of infant disease and infant death in the United States. One such important health implication of premature births is related to brain development, with approximately 1 million preterm individuals every year affected by negatively altered brain development. The exact causes of premature births are not yet known by scientists. However, it is known that there are many factors…

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An asteroid recently came blazing through our solar system and it appears to be an interstellar visitor. The asteroid, dubbed A/2017 U1, would be the first interstellar object ever to be observed within our own solar system. A/2017 U1 caught the attention of astronomers because of its astounding speed. The quarter-mile long asteroid, or rather, exoroid, was spotted heading away from Earth at 24 miles per second, which is over 100 times faster than the speed of sound. NASA spotted A/2017 as part of its nightly near-Earth object search on Oct 19, when it came 15 million miles away from Earth. That’s about 60 times farther than the Moon. Upon investigating the origin of this exoroid, scientists noticed a few oddities. Nearly everything in our solar system exists in a plane, like a dinner plate, with the sun at the center and all the planets and asteroids orbiting around. Most…

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An international team of scientist have detected a new cavity in the 4000 year old Great Pyramid of Egypt! The detection method, muon tomography, is non-intrusive and so the discovery still awaits confirmation using more traditional techniques that involve (minimally invasive) drills and flashlights. But let’s first take a step back. What is this muon tomography thing anyway? To take an X-ray of a human, you need a source (an X-ray machine), a medium (the human body), and a detector (a film, like a regular camera film, that is sensitive to X-rays). X-rays are high-energy particles that are sensitive to the density of what is in the medium – they can’t go through bone, but can go through flesh. As such, X-rays are used commonly to image possible fractures and other bone damage non-intrusively. Muon tomography works similarly. Instead of a machine that generates X-rays, scientists use cosmic rays originating…

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By Alexander Adranly Thanks to NASA’s Kepler Mission, over one-thousand potentially habitable exoplanets have been discovered to-date, orbiting around their respective stars. An exoplanet refers to any planet outside of our solar system. The discoveries of these worlds are a major accomplishment for us, but the question still persists: which of these exoplanets may best host carbon-based life similar to what the Earth hosts? It would be impractical, given our current abilities, for us to send life to the planet and see whether it lives or dies. Instead, we can safely attempt to determine this by simulating the planet’s environment and testing it with what we know about life here. The type of star(s) in a solar system plays an important role in a planet’s environment. About 70% of the stars in the Milky Way Galaxy are classified as M dwarfs, which are low-mass stars that often produce solar flares.…

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A paper authored by Mario Bronzanti, Oliver Rauhut, Jonathas Bittencourt, and Max Langer in September of this year traced the evolution of the brain in the largest animals to ever walk the planet—the sauropods. The authors studied a braincase from Saturnalia tupiniquim, an ancestral form of sauropod called a sauropodomorph. By studying Saturnalia, they could observe how a certain lobe of the brain changed from one of the oldest (~230 million years old) true dinosaurs ever recovered. This lineage of dinosaur led to the largest group of herbivores to ever walk the planet. Digital paleoneurology is a relatively new field of paleontology that uses computed tomography (CT) scans to show details of the inside of fossils by looking at negative spaces. Negative spaces are produced when, during decomposition, the soft tissues of the brain are replaced with sediment that surrounds the braincase. These sediments are less dense than the fossilized…

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Do you love tuna sushi? Did you know that the number of tuna in the ocean has gone down drastically due to overfishing? The law of supply and demand tells us that as the availability of fish decreases, the price will go up. This is bad news for fish and the humans who eat them. Researchers in Japan want to make sure future generations will get to enjoy eating tuna without further hurting the wild tuna populations. To achieve this goal, scientists from many universities have been developing a method for raising bluefin tuna from egg to adult and back to egg entirely in captivity. Currently, most tuna farming is more like ranching – farmers take young fish from the wild and grow them in net pens, then slaughter them once they’ve reached market size. This does not create any additional tuna to help replenish wild populations. In fact, it…

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A new field of science is born – astromaterial science. First mentioned in today’s paper, this scientific field studies materials of astronomical objects that are denser than materials commonly found on Earth. Scientists, M. E. Caplan and C. J. Horowitz, introduce the field of astromaterial science, starting with two major materials of interest, Coulomb crystals and nuclear pasta. Both of these materials occur in a particularly unique celestial body – the neutron star. Neutron stars are the massively dense remnants of supernovae. Supernovae mark the dramatic end to a giant star’s life. As these massive stars grow to enormous sizes, then the fusion of the stars begin to fail, and the stars explode. During a supernova explosion, most of the mass of the star is ejected into the vastness of space. However, the core of the star stays behind and collapses on itself to form a new, dense star –…

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A new field of science is born – astromaterial science. First mentioned in today’s paper, this scientific field studies materials of astronomical objects that are denser than materials commonly found on Earth. Scientists, M. E. Caplan and C. J. Horowitz, introduce the field of astromaterial science, starting with two major materials of interest, Coulomb crystals and nuclear pasta. Both of these materials occur in a particularly unique celestial body – the neutron star. Neutron stars are the massively dense remnants of supernovae. Supernovae mark the dramatic end to a giant star’s life. As these massive stars grow to enormous sizes, then the fusion of the stars begin to fail, and the stars explode. During a supernova explosion, most of the mass of the star is ejected into the vastness of space. However, the core of the star stays behind and collapses on itself to form a new, dense star –…

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A new field of science is born – astromaterial science. First mentioned in today’s paper, this scientific field studies materials of astronomical objects that are denser than materials commonly found on Earth. Scientists, M. E. Caplan and C. J. Horowitz, introduce the field of astromaterial science, starting with two major materials of interest, Coulomb crystals and nuclear pasta. Both of these materials occur in a particularly unique celestial body – the neutron star. Neutron stars are the massively dense remnants of supernovae. Supernovae mark the dramatic end to a giant star’s life. As these massive stars grow to enormous sizes, then the fusion of the stars begin to fail, and the stars explode. During a supernova explosion, most of the mass of the star is ejected into the vastness of space. However, the core of the star stays behind and collapses on itself to form a new, dense star –…

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It is well known that after cardiovascular surgery to replace the aortic valve (one of the four valves of the heart, between the left ventricle and the aorta), patients can sometimes develop adverse events and injuries to their heart as a consequence of the surgery. As this surgery consists of temporarily stopping blood flow of the heart, this can lead to an imbalance of oxygen supply and demand in the heart, leading to injury of the tissue. There has also been some evidence that more heart attacks happen in the morning compared to the evening. However, surgery outcomes as they relate to time of day have not been well studied. To answer this question, researchers from Lille University Hospital in France examined whether having this surgery in the morning or the afternoon would lead to fewer injuries and adverse events post-surgery such as heart failure, second heart attack, or death.…

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It is well known that after cardiovascular surgery to replace the aortic valve (one of the four valves of the heart, between the left ventricle and the aorta), patients can sometimes develop adverse events and injuries to their heart as a consequence of the surgery. As this surgery consists of temporarily stopping blood flow of the heart, this can lead to an imbalance of oxygen supply and demand in the heart, leading to injury of the tissue. There has also been some evidence that more heart attacks happen in the morning compared to the evening. However, surgery outcomes as they relate to time of day have not been well studied. To answer this question, researchers from Lille University Hospital in France examined whether having this surgery in the morning or the afternoon would lead to fewer injuries and adverse events post-surgery such as heart failure, second heart attack, or death.…

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Tsunami are among the most destructive natural events that happen on our planet. From the Japanese term meaning “harbor wave”, tsunami occur when large volumes of water are quickly moved about in the ocean, which can be driven by events like earthquakes and glacial calving (when pieces of a glacier break off and fall into the ocean). For instance, earthquakes caused the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that killed over 220,000 people as well as the 2011 Tōhoku tsunami that caused over 14,000 deaths in Japan (and triggered the cooling system failure at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant). Given the prevalence of human populations in coastal areas over time, it’s not surprising that tsunami have impacted human societies so greatly. However, little record has existed for the impact of tsunami to human populations in prehistory (before the development of written records). Now, new research from Professor James Goff, of the…

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Tsunami are among the most destructive natural events that happen on our planet. From the Japanese term meaning “harbor wave”, tsunami occur when large volumes of water are quickly moved about in the ocean, which can be driven by events like earthquakes and glacial calving (when pieces of a glacier break off and fall into the ocean). For instance, earthquakes caused the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that killed over 220,000 people as well as the 2011 Tōhoku tsunami that caused over 14,000 deaths in Japan (and triggered the cooling system failure at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant). Given the prevalence of human populations in coastal areas over time, it’s not surprising that tsunami have impacted human societies so greatly. However, little record has existed for the impact of tsunami to human populations in prehistory (before the development of written records). Now, new research from Professor James Goff, of the…

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