The sun’s energy is virtually limitless, but harnessing its electricity with today’s single-crystal silicon solar cells is extremely expensive — 10 times pricier than coal, according to some estimates. Organic solar cells — polymer solar cells that use organic materials to absorb light and convert it into electricity — could be a solution, but current…
The massive amounts of heat produced by cities may be heating up rural areas 1,000 miles away, atmospheric researchers have found in a new modeling study. Scientists have long invoked the “urban island heat effect” to explain why cities are generally hotter than suburban and rural areas. More people, as well as more cars, houses,…
Research projects investigating the “miracle material” graphene and the human brain have won unprecedented funding of up to 1 billion euros each. Under the European Commission’s Future and Emerging Technologies programme, the backing is designed to give Europe an edge in key areas of research. Graphene – a single-layer of carbon atoms – has extraordinary…
What is biological immortality? To be fair, it’s not the promise of a paradisiacal garden. Neither is it the ultimate, or final, defeat of death. Instead, biological immortality has to do with aging. An organism that is biologically immortal does not age. We primarily age (the theory goes) because the cells that comprise us age….
NASA and the European Space Agency announced that the two organizations have partnered on the ESA’s Euclid mission. This mission, a space telescope that launches in 2020, is designed to further astronomers’ understanding of the roles dark matter and dark energy played in the evolution of the universe. “NASA is very proud to contribute to…
Tiny fish trapped in a virtual world provide a window into complex brain connections as a research team at Harvard tries to answer the biggest question in neuroscience: how a doughy mass of neurons in the brain gives rise to an exquisite suite of behaviours, absorbing information from the outside world and generating responses.
A new study indicates that the last interglacial period may give us a picture of where the planet is headed now, as greenhouse gases increase and temperatures rise. Results from the NEEM deep ice core drilling project, led by the University of Copenhagen, show that during the Eemian period, between 130,000 and 115,000 years ago,…
Britain’s most senior medical adviser has warned MPs that the rise in drug-resistant diseases could trigger a national emergency comparable to a catastrophic terrorist attack, pandemic flu or major coastal flooding. Dame Sally Davies, the chief medical officer, said the threat from infections that are resistant to frontline antibiotics was so serious that the issue…
Learning becomes more difficult as we age not because we have trouble absorbing new information, but because we fail to forget the old stuff, researchers say. Mice whose brains were genetically modified to resemble those of adult humans showed no decrease in the ability to make the strong synaptic connections that enable learning — a…
Yoga has positive effects on mild depression and sleep complaints, even in the absence of drug treatments, and improves symptoms associated with schizophrenia and ADHD in patients on medication, according to a systematic review of the exercise on major clinical psychiatric disorders. Published in the open-access journal, Frontiers in Psychiatry, the review of more than…