Engineers at the University of Cambridge created an algae battery that successfully powered a microprocessor computer for 6 months, on the current generated from a freshwater cyanobacteria.
Researchers at the University of Florida have successfully grown plants in soil from the moon. The research used soil samples collected during the Apollo 11, 12, & 17 missions to test how well thale cress could or would grow in the extra-terrestrial soil. The cress was a champ and grew in the lunar soil, albeit it at a slower rate than in earth soil, while dealing with metabolic and oxidative stress.
UK based startup Invisibility Shield Co. has created a shield that using lenticular lensing to hide an object behind the shield, while displaying the background.
Researchers from GE, Yale, UCLA, and the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research demonstrated a new treatment for diabetes using ultrasound. Targeting an area of the liver with short ultrasonic bursts can reverse the onset of hyperglycaemia with this non-invasive treatment.
Engineers at MIT and The Rhode Island School of Design have developed a piezoelectric fabric that can capture sounds by detecting vibrations and convert them into electric signals like a microphone. It is envisaged that the acoustic fabric could be used to monitor heart rates and respiratory sounds of the wearer. The fabric can also reverse the process and play sound that can be picked up by other fabric.
Professor Hideyuki Sawada from Kagawa University has created an utterance robot that manipulates the shape of a mouth and nasal cavity to produce sounds that simulate how humans speak. The robot also uses machine learning to hear its own utterance and improve them over time.
Australian scientists have discovered how to map the geological history of the earth in grains of sand, by measuring the distribution of zircon within the sand.
Researchers at Linköping University have created and connected synthetic organic neurons and synapses to those of a Venus fly trap plant and successfully triggered the plant to close its leaves.
Researchers at the University of Texas have developed a new technique to fight antibiotic resistance in bacteria by identifying and inhibiting proteins that help store and spread resistance information.
