University College Cork (UCC)

“Any emerging disease in the last 30 or 40 years has come about as a result of encroachment into wild lands and changes in demography,” THERE’S a term biologists and economists use these days — ecosystem services — which refers to the many ways nature supports the human endeavor. Forests filter the water we drink,

A thin layer of graphene paint can make impermeable and chemically resistant coatings which could be used for packaging to keep food fresh for longer and protect metal structures against corrosion, new findings from The University of Manchester show. The surface of graphene, a one atom thick sheet of carbon, can be randomly decorated with

Hunters don camouflage clothing to blend in with their surroundings. But thermal camouflage – or the appearance of being the same temperature as one’s environment – is much more difficult. Now researchers, reporting in ACS’ journal Nano Letters, have developed a system that can reconfigure its thermal appearance to blend in with varying temperatures in a

Study suggests loss of blood vessels in retina reflect changes in brain health A quick eye exam might one day allow eye doctors to check up on both your eyeglasses prescription and your brain health. A study of more than 200 people at the Duke Eye Center published March 11 in the journal Ophthalmology Retina suggests the loss

University of Virginia mechanical engineers and materials scientists, in collaboration with materials scientists at Penn State, the University of Maryland and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, have invented a “switching effect” for thermal conductivity and mechanical properties that can be incorporated into the fabrication of materials including textiles and garments. Using heat transport

3D scanning takes many shapes and forms, but all take something from LiDAR (Light detection and ranging). This has been around since the invention of the laser itself, and uses light beams to find out exactly where pixels are in 3D space by measuring the returning signal. While widely used in robotics and even geographic

Researchers in China have developed a genetic engineering approach capable of delivering many genes at once and used it to make rice endosperm–seed tissue that provides nutrients to the developing plant embryo–produce high levels of antioxidant-boosting pigments called anthocyanins. The resulting purple endosperm rice holds potential for decreasing the risk of certain cancers, cardiovascular disease,

Biomedical engineers cut post-processing steps to make electrospun nanofibers for wound healing and improve 3D-matrices for biological tissues. They speed up  prototyping using identical materials. Electrospinning uses electric fields to manipulate nanoscale and microscale fibers. The technique is well-developed but time-intensive and costly. A team from Michigan Technological University came up with a new way

Researchers in Germany studied how a multitude of electronic interactions govern the encounter between a molecule called porphine and copper and silver surfaces – information that could one day be harnessed to make molecular building blocks self-assemble into nanodevices As we continue to shrink electronic components, top-down manufacturing methods begin to approach a physical limit

The winning team will get a $10,000 prize The idea is to extend the Kinect’s potential uses from gaming to things like interpreting lipreading and sign language as well as determining whether a hospital patient has suddenly taken a bad turn. A venture that started in a Bondi flat is helping Microsoft unlock the power