New research being presented at this year’s European Congress on Obesity (ECO) in Maastricht, Netherlands (4-7 May), finds that not getting enough good quality sleep undermines people’s attempts to keep weight off after dieting, and suggests that around two hours of vigorous physical activity per week can help maintain better sleep. The study is by […]

To be truly useful, drones—that is, autonomous flying vehicles—will need to learn to navigate real-world weather and wind conditions. Right now, drones are either flown under controlled conditions, with no wind, or are operated by humans using remote controls. Drones have been taught to fly in formation in the open skies, but those flights are usually conducted […]

You are no doubt viewing this article on a digital device whose basic unit of information is the bit, either 0 or 1. Scientists worldwide are racing to develop a new kind of computer based on the use of quantum bits, or qubits, which can simultaneously be 0 and 1 and could one day solve […]

Clusters of microscopic bacteria exist all around us. These invisible communities, known as biofilms, are found in habitats ranging from our skin surface to sewer pipes and play integral roles in environments spanning healthcare to agriculture. Molecular biologists and physicists at the University of California San Diego have joined forces to develop a novel method […]

In black widow star systems, a rapidly spinning dead star, called a pulsar, blasts its orbiting companion with radiation, slowly evaporating it. Like their namesake spiders, the pulsars take advantage of their lower-mass companions before destroying them, by harnessing material and energy from the doomed partner stars. A new study published in the journal Nature reports a […]

An international team of researchers has developed a new concept for managing the wastewater from industrial battery recycling facilities. It involves an electrodeposition process to create an electrode material from metal species in the wastewater, which is subsequently used as an electrocatalyst for splitting the same wastewater and generating hydrogen. ‘Critical transition metals, for example, […]

Prebiotic RNA molecules could have copied themselves with the help of cycles of freezing and thawing. The finding offers another clue to solve a longstanding puzzle surrounding the ‘RNA world’ model of life’s origins: how RNA strands could self-replicate without the help of enzymes. Jack Szostak’s group at Harvard University, US, had previously shown that […]

Modern machine-learning models, such as neural networks, are often referred to as “black boxes” because they are so complex that even the researchers who design them can’t fully understand how they make predictions. To provide some insights, researchers use explanation methods that seek to describe individual model decisions. For example, they may highlight words in […]

Have you noticed? In the United States there is a push toward more use of electricity to power our lives. I, for one, have. We see the impact of that in and around the home, on the road and even at the utility-scale level. What this means is there has been increased reliance on electric […]

The flashing of a nearby star has drawn MIT astronomers to a new and mysterious system 3,000 light years from Earth. The stellar oddity appears to be a new “black widow binary” — a rapidly spinning neutron star, or pulsar, that is circling and slowly consuming a smaller companion star, as its arachnid namesake does […]