In a study led by the University of Leeds, scientists have solved one of the most long-standing challenges in atmospheric science: to understand how particles are formed in the atmosphere. Fundamental questions remain about the origin of newly formed atmospheric aerosol particles because data from laboratory measurements have been insufficient to build global models. In contrast, gas-phase chemistry models have been based on laboratory kinetics measurements for decades. Here we build a global...

New training technique would reveal the basis for machine-learning systems’ decisions. In recent years, the best-performing systems in artificial-intelligence research have come courtesy of neural networks, which look for patterns in training data that yield useful predictions or classifications. A neural net might, for instance, be trained to recognize certain objects in digital images or to infer the topics of texts. But neural nets are black boxes. After training, a network may be very ...

Hanging around the kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil is a thing of the past. Whether you’re super efficient or ultra lazy the iKettle will save you over two days a year. With the iKettle 2.0 you can check your water level remotely. Never will you have to re-boil the kettle when you have more than a few guests. Now you can control all products via the Smarter app using one single interface. The centre dial allows you to customise your brew within seconds giving you complete control and...

British label Emel + Aris has launched a smart coat range for men and women using infrared-heating technology. Founder Rana Nakhal Solset is working with a proprietary fabric and a special polymer in the lining of the coat that produces the heat. “There’s three levels of heating — low, medium and high — so you can regulate it,” Solset said. “The technology ensures you that you can’t overheat. It’s like wearing a warm blanket so you can be at ease and comfortable. The heat that it generates...

One day, microrobots may be able to swim through the human body like sperm or paramecia to carry out medical functions in specific locations. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart have developed functional elastomers, which can be activated by magnetic fields to imitate the swimming gaits of natural flagella, cilia and jellyfish. Using a specially developed computer algorithm, the researchers can now automatically generate the optimal magnetic conditions ...

Fossil fuels have ushered in the modern industrial age, but carbon-neutral methods of electricity production are needed for the future. Salinity gradient energy (SGE) is one approach that is based on using two solutions with large differences in salt concentration to produce electricity. These include naturally occurring water sources with different salinities, such as river water and seawater, and salt brines and seawater or river water, or treated used waters and seawater prior to discharge in...

A microbial fuel cells (MFC) or biological fuel cell is a bio-electrochemical system that drives a current by using bacteria and mimicking bacterial interactions found in nature. MFCs can be grouped into two general categories: mediated and unmediated. Renewable and clean forms of energy are one of society's greatest needs.  At the same time, 2 billion people in the world lack adequate sanitation and the economic means to afford it.  In this research, we are working to address both of these hum...

Robots have traditionally been made from hard materials such as metal and plastic. They have been driven by motors and other heavy electro-mechanical actuators. These robots are more like machines than biological organisms. Soft robotics on the other hand seeks to make robots that are soft, flexible and compliant, just like biological organisms. The ‘body’ of a soft robot is soft like natural tissue. A soft robot is driven not by heavy motors but by soft artificial muscles. The energy stor...

U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved pembrolizumab (KEYTRUDA, Merck & Co., Inc.) for the treatment of patients with metastatic non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) whose tumors express PD-L1 as determined by an FDA-approved test. This is the first FDA approval of a checkpoint inhibitor for first-line treatment of lung cancer. This approval also expands the indication in second-line treatment of lung cancer to include all patients with PD-L1-expressing NSCLC. The FDA approval ad...

Kidney cancer—also called renal cell cancer—is one of the major types of cancer for which new immune-based cancer treatments are currently in development. This page features information on kidney cancer and immunotherapy clinical trials for kidney cancer patients, and highlights the Cancer Research Institute’s role in working to bring effective immune-based cancer treatments to kidney cancer patients. In its early stages, kidney cancer typically has no symptoms. As a tumor grows, symptoms may...

Colorado Therapeutics LLC, a privately held medical device company with a proprietary technology platform for the production of innovative cross-linked tissue products, announced today that it has received 510(k) clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”) for a novel xenogenic biologic tissue matrix. The Colorado Therapeutics xenograft implant is intended to be used for implantation to reinforce soft tissue where weakness exists and for the surgical repair of damaged or rupt...

Identifying whether a potential drug is having an effect on cancer cells is not always obvious. If enough cells change their morphology, it’s fairly easy to see the change under a microscope. Spotting individual cells that are unique among millions of others is what researchers at Brown University have been working on. They developed a high speed vision system that outlines cells that just went through an epithelial–mesenchymal transition (EMT). Within tumors such cells lead to greater malignanc...

Mooltipass Mini connects to your computer or smartphone and stores your passwords using a PIN-protected smart card. When you get started, the Mooltipass browser extension or smartphone app asks you to enter your password for each account, which it then saves. It also acts as a USB keyboard for adding in passwords manually. After that you’ll only need to log in by connecting the device and hitting its login button. In theory, it cuts out the need to remember and enter passwords each time you logi...

Food Safety has become one of the major priorities of the EU, with impact in public health and economy. The seriousness with which the Food Safety issue is addressed in Europe is reflected in the stringent national legislations and EU directives that have been issued over the recent years. The numerous food scandals that have The numerous food scandals that have been occurred during the last decade have increased consumers’ awareness concerning food safety, leading to calls for tighter food s...

Smartphone apps are now an integral part of our daily lives. We already use them to check in on our bank accounts, keep in touch with friends and play games but how about controlling our sofas? The brand new Aladin app by ROM will take the term ‘smart home’ to a whole new level by allowing you to control your sofa positions with a simple touch of a button. Your ALADIN Sofa is capable of things that other sofas are not capable of! After configuring your sofa via our app, you can simply s...

As humans, we sniff out different scents and aromas using chemical receptors in our noses. In technological gas detection, however, there are a whole host of other methods available. One such method is to use infrared lasers, passing a laser beam through the gas to an adjacent separate detector, which measures the degree of light attenuation it causes. TU Wien's tiny new sensor now brings together both sides within a single component, making it possible to use the same microscopic structure for ...

Approximately 2% of Americans have a visual disability— vision that cannot be corrected even with the strongest prescription—and in developing countries where infectious disease or untreated cataracts are more common, the percentage is often higher. Many different diseases and conditions can cause low vision, including age-related macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy, and cone dystrophy (a genetic mutation affecting the cone cells of the retina). People with low vision find everyday act...

One may not think that the humble toothbrush is a particularly glamorous health device, but if you scour the Dentistry category here on Medgadget, you’ll quickly discover how important oral health is to your overall health. So important is dental health that October in America has been designated National Dental Hygiene Month. To help commemorate this important month, we were given two electric toothbrushes that have evolved into the “smart” category. These smart toothbrushes feature Bluetooth t...

Recent research suggests that nanotechnologies may lead to the development of novel cancer treatment. Gold nanoparticles with their unique physical and chemical properties hold great hopes for the development of thermal-based therapies against human malignancies. This review will focus on various strategies that have been developed to use gold nanoparticles as photothermal agents against human cancers. Pancreatic cancer begins in the tissues of your pancreas — an organ in your abdomen that li...

Team of scientists, led by the University of Southampton, have produced a fast nanoscale optical transistor using gold nanoantenna assisted phase transition. The work, published in the journal Light, Science and Applications, opens up new directions in antenna-assisted switches and optical memory. Small nanostructures that can interact strongly with light are of interest for a range of emerging new applications including small optical circuits and metasurface flat optics. Nanoantennas are ...

Phenotypic plasticity can be defined as the ability of one genotype to produce more than one phenotype when exposed to different environments. Phenotypic plasticity is the ability of an organism to change its phenotype in response to changes in the environment. With climate change forcing plant and animal species to adapt, shape-shifters are taking a unique approach that involves changing their physical appearance without having to migrate or evolve in order to cope, new research shows. A ...

Start, locate and control your car from virtually anywhere with your iPhone, or Apple Watch! “Making the cloud-connected car a reality”. You can remote start or lock and unlock your car just by pushing a button on your iPhone or iPod Touch; using the exciting new Viper SmartStart app from Directed Electronics, the leader in vehicle security and remote start. The simple graphical interface gives you control over the following features of your installed Viper remote start or security/remote sta...

Did you know that your brain processes information in a hierarchy? As you are reading this page, the signal coming in through your eyes enters your brain through the thalamus, which organizes it. That information then goes on to the primary visual cortex at the back of the brain, where populations of neurons respond to very specific basic properties. For instance, one set of neurons might fire up because the text on your screen is black and another set might activate because there are vertical l...

From the journey of protons racing through the world’s largest particle collider in Europe to up-close views of the Big Bang and emergent universe, and the nearly mile-deep descent to an underground experiment in South Dakota, a new planetarium show is designed to immerse audiences in the manifold search for dark matter. Michael Barnett, a physicist at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), imagined these scenes coming to life inside planetarium domes...

A team of Harvard scientists led by Venkatesh Murthy, professor of molecular and cellular biology, tackled a seemingly complex phenomenon in their investigation: how mice can distinguish scents from one another. Using a machine-learning algorithm, Murthy and his colleagues “trained” a computer to recognize the neural patterns linked to various scents, and to identify specific odors in a mixture of smells. The study, published in the journal Neuron, focused on creating an algorithm for a compu...

For years, doctors have had reliable charts of the body and its organs -- blood circulation, digestive system, nerves and the like -- but always with one frustrating grey zone: the brain. On Wednesday, a team of neuroscientists, computer specialists and engineers said they had compiled what "could be the most accurate map yet" of the mysterious expanse between our ears. In the process, they discovered nearly 100 previously unreported regions of the organ's wrinkly outer layer -- called the...

Relying on a single router is like asking a loud speaker in your living room to provide great sound throughout your home. It’s simple physics: WiFi waves don’t go through walls well and have an even harder time climbing stairs. Ever tried to stream a show from your bedroom when your router’s in the office downstairs? It’s a buffering nightmare. To solve this, you need multiple access points — devices that broadcast WiFi — distributed throughout your home. That’s what you’ll find in office bui...