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Cradle Turns Smartphone Into Handheld Biosensor

Cradle Turns Smartphone Into Handheld Biosensor

Researchers and physicians in the field could soon run on-the-spot tests for environmental toxins, medical diagnostics, food safety and more with their smartphones.   University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign researchers have developed a cradle and app for the iPhone that uses the phone’s built-in camera and processing power as a biosensor to detect toxins, proteins, [...]

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Big Data, for Better or Worse: 90% of World’s Data Generated Over Last Two Years

Big Data, for Better or Worse: 90% of World’s Data Generated Over Last Two Years

A full 90% of all the data in the world has been generated over the last two years. The internet companies are awash with data that can be grouped and utilised. Is this a good thing?   An increasing amount of data is becoming available on the internet. Each and every one of us is [...]

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A Tiny Programmable Fly’s Eye

A Tiny Programmable Fly’s Eye

A novel curved artificial compound eye (CurvACE) has been conceived by a collaboration implying researchers from CNRS, Aix-Marseille Université, EPFL at Lausanne, Fraunhofer Institute at Jena and Université de Tuebingen. Compared to single-lens eyes, compound eyes offer lower resolution, but significantly larger fields of view, thin package, and with negligible distortion. Futhermore, CurvACE has embedded [...]

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Soft Matter Offers New Ways to Study How Materials Arrange

Soft Matter Offers New Ways to Study How Materials Arrange

A fried breakfast food popular in Spain provided the inspiration for the development of doughnut-shaped droplets that may provide scientists with a new approach for studying fundamental issues in physics, mathematics and materials.   The doughnut-shaped droplets, a shape known as toroidal, are formed from two dissimilar liquids using a simple rotating stage and an [...]

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Bionimbus Protected Data Cloud to Enable Researchers to Analyze Cancer Data

Bionimbus Protected Data Cloud to Enable Researchers to Analyze Cancer Data

The University of Chicago has launched the first secure cloud-based computing system that enables researchers to access and analyze human genomic cancer information without the costly and cumbersome infrastructure normally needed to download and store massive amounts of data.   The Bionimbus Protected Data Cloud, as it is called, enables researchers who are authorized by [...]

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Fast and Painless Way to Better Mental Arithmetic?

Fast and Painless Way to Better Mental Arithmetic?

In the future, if you want to improve your ability to manipulate numbers in your head, you might just plug yourself in. So say researchers who report in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on May 16 on studies of a harmless form of brain stimulation applied to an area known to be important for [...]

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Making Frequency-Hopping Radios Practical

Making Frequency-Hopping Radios Practical

New hardware could lead to wireless devices that identify and exploit unused transmission frequencies, using radio spectrum much more efficiently.   The way in which radio spectrum is currently allocated to different wireless technologies can lead to gross inefficiencies. In some regions, for instance, the frequencies used by cellphones can be desperately congested, while large [...]

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Electronics Comes to Paper: Paper, Being Light and Foldable, Works Well for Electrically Conducting Structures

Electronics Comes to Paper: Paper, Being Light and Foldable, Works Well for Electrically Conducting Structures

Paper, being a light and foldable raw material, is a cost-efficient and simple means of generating electrically conducting structures.   Paper is becoming a high-tech material. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam-Golm have created targeted conductive structures on paper using a method that is quite simple: with a conventional [...]

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Scientists Use Crowd-Sourcing to Help Map Global Carbon Dioxide Emissions

Scientists Use Crowd-Sourcing to Help Map Global Carbon Dioxide Emissions

Climate science researchers from Arizona State University are launching a first-of-its-kind online “game” to better understand the sources of global warming gases. By engaging “citizen scientists,” the researchers hope to locate all the power plants around the world and quantify their carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.   The game officially begins today and is housed on [...]

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Data Storage: Synchronized at the ‘Write Time’

Data Storage: Synchronized at the ‘Write Time’

Numerical simulations show how to avoid imperfections in the next generation of high-density data storage.   The rise of the internet and the move from paper to digital information has driven a need for large-volume electronic data storage. Maria Yu Lin and her co‐workers at the A*STAR Data Storage Institute, Singapore, have now established some [...]

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