A team of electrical engineers at The University of Texas at Austin, in collaboration with Peking University scientists, has developed the thinnest memory storage device with dense memory capacity, paving the way for faster, smaller and smarter computer chips for everything from consumer electronics to big data to brain-inspired computing. “For a long time, the consensus was that it wasn’t possible to make memory devices from materials that were only one atomic layer thick,” said Deji Akinwande, associate professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering....

“The present-day nebula holds the secrets that reveal its past; we just need to be able to uncover them,” said Wanggi Lim, a Universities Space Research Association scientist at the SOFIA Science Center at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. “SOFIA lets us do this, so we can understand why the nebula looks the way it does today.” Uncovering the nebula’s secrets is no simple task. It’s located more than 5,000 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius....

Lake Urmia — a massive salt lake in Iran’s northwest and a sister to Utah’s Great Salt Lake — has lost nearly 95 percent of its volume over the last two decades. As water levels drop, salinity spikes, threatening the lake’s brine shrimp population and the flamingos and other bird species that depend on the shrimp for food. Lake levels are so low that at some coastal resorts, tourism boats must be pulled a kilometer (0....

The system, known as nanophotonics-enabled solar membrane distillation (NESMD), incorporates a porous membrane with carbon black nanoparticles. The nanoparticles use sunlight energy to heat water on one side of the membrane, which filters out salt and other non-volatile contaminants while allowing water vapor to pass through it. The technology comes from the Center for Nanotechnology-Enabled Water Treatment (NEWT), a multi-institutional engineering research center. Based at Rice, it includes Yale and several other partners from industry, government, and other universities....

New findings from a team at MIT and other institutions could provide a pathway toward a kind of two-dimensional microchip that would make use of a characteristic of electrons other than their electrical charge, as in conventional electronics. The new approach is dubbed “valleytronics,” because it makes use of properties of an electron that can be depicted as a pair of deep valleys on a graph of their traits. The findings are described in a paper set to appear in the journal Nature Materials, co-authored by MIT graduate student Edbert Jarvis Sie, MIT associate professor Nuh Gedik, and five others....

Trigger likely to be immune response to chemical in e-cigarette fluid, say doctors. The fluid in e-cigarettes may cause a potentially life-threatening lung inflammation in those who are susceptible, warn doctors in the Archives of Disease in Childhood after treating a teenage boy with respiratory failure linked to vaping. The trigger for the condition, which led to this, is likely to have been an exaggerated immune response to one of the chemicals found in e-cigarette fluid, they say....

In a paper released today (October 23) in Addiction, researchers from 41 international institutions released their findings after analyzing sewage samples from 60 million people between 2011 and 2017, the largest wastewater-based study undertaken in the world. University of South Australia chemist Dr. Richard Bade — one of the lead authors — says Adelaide, Canberra, and Toowoomba were the three Australian cities monitored among 120 cities worldwide. In 2017, Adelaide’s wastewater was monitored for a week, revealing between 507 and 659 milligrams of methamphetamine per 1000 people each day....

Near-Infrared Light Uncovers Vast Populations of Forming Stars, Many Still Encased in Dust NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera captured this glittering view of the Pillars of Creation – and it begs to be examined pixel by pixel. It is a stunning scene that may look both familiar and entirely new at the same time. It was first captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope in 1995 and followed up in 2014, and many other telescopes have deeply gazed at this scene....

“It was pretty incredible, actually. The whole brain lit up,” said Anna Andreassen, a Ph.D. candidate at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). Living organisms, whether it be fish or humans, tend to function worse as the temperature increases. Many people have probably gone through this on a summer day that was a bit too hot. But what precisely occurs inside the body when it becomes uncomfortably warm?...

They’re both in charge of teams at SLAC’s Accelerator Directorate, which has been working on a major upgrade to the LCLS X-ray laser. The LCLS-II project includes the addition of a superconducting accelerator that will create a second X-ray laser beam that is 10,000 times brighter and fires 8,000 times faster than its predecessor, up to a million pulses per second. Ratcliffe’s job includes coordinating the manufacturing, distribution, and installation of the accelerator’s components....

Published this week in Cell Reports, this finding — from Gaetano Montelione, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and his collaborators at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the University of Texas at Austin — raises the potential for repurposing available drugs as COVID-19 antivirals in cases where a vaccine isn’t practical or effective. Remdesivir, which blocks viral replication by interfering with a viral polymerase, must be administered intravenously, limiting its use only to patients sick enough to be admitted to a hospital....

The findings of their new study, published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, shed light on why many type 1 diabetics fail to respond to potentially dangerous drops in their blood sugar levels. In healthy, non-diabetic adults, a drop in blood sugar stimulates the body to make glucose and also seek food. But many individuals with type 1 diabetes don’t have the same responses to reductions in blood sugar that can result from insulin treatment....

Time-sensitive neurons fatigue and skew our perception of time. On some days, time flies by, while on others it seems to drag on. A new study from JNeurosci reveals why: time-sensitive neurons get worn out and skew our perceptions of time. Neurons in the supramarginal gyrus (SMG) fire in response to a specific length of time. If repeatedly exposed to a stimulus of a fixed duration, the neurons fatigue. Since other neurons continue firing normally, our subjective perception of time becomes skewed....

Women temporarily synchronize their menstrual cycles with the luminance and gravimetric cycles of the Moon. An analysis of long-term menstrual cycle records kept by 22 women for up to 32 years shows that women with cycles lasting longer than 27 days intermittently synchronized with cycles that affect the intensity of moonlight and the moon’s gravitational pull. This synchrony was lost as women aged and when they were exposed to artificial light at night....

Monash University researchers are on the brink of commercializing the world’s most efficient lithium-sulfur (Li-S) battery, which could outperform current market leaders by more than four times, and power Australia and other global markets well into the future. Dr. Mahdokht Shaibani from Monash University’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering led an international research team that developed an ultra-high capacity Li-S battery that has better performance and less environmental impact than current lithium-ion products....

The discovery means there are now new puzzles to solve, in terms of how time crystals form in the first place. Ordinary crystals such as salt or quartz are examples of three-dimensional, ordered spatial crystals. Their atoms are arranged in a repeating system, something scientists have known for a century. Time crystals, first identified in 2016, are different. Their atoms spin periodically, first in one direction and then in another, as a pulsating force is used to flip them....

The researchers previously developed a mathematical model predicting the order of COVID-19 symptoms based on data from the initial outbreak in China in early 2020. In the new work, they wanted to know whether the order of symptoms varied in patients from different geographical regions or with various patient characteristics. They used their modeling approach to predict symptom order in a set of 373,883 cases in the USA between January and May 2020....

The giant star Zeta Ophiuchi is having a “shocking” effect on the surrounding dust clouds in this infrared image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. Stellar winds flowing out from this fast-moving star are making ripples in the dust as it approaches, creating a bow shock seen as glowing gossamer threads, which, for this star, are only seen in infrared light. Zeta Ophiuchi is a young, large and hot star located around 370 light-years away....

Paleontologist Dr. Jordan Mallon says the evidence points to a phenomenon called “bloat-and-float”, whereby the bloating carcasses of ankylosaurs would end up in a river, flip belly-side up due to the weight of their heavy armor, and then float downstream. The remains would wash ashore, where decomposition and then fossilization would seal the dinosaur remains in their upside-down death pose. “Textbooks have touted that ankylosaurus fossils are usually found upside down, but no one has gone back and checked the records to make sure that’s the case,” explains Mallon....

“Blue” hydrogen – an energy source that involves a process for making hydrogen by using methane in natural gas – is being lauded by many as a clean, green energy to help reduce global warming. But Cornell and Stanford University researchers believe it may harm the climate more than burning fossil fuel. The carbon footprint to create blue hydrogen is more than 20% greater than using either natural gas or coal directly for heat, or about 60% greater than using diesel oil for heat, according to new research published August 12 in Energy Science & Engineering....