Tardigrades are often considered the most endearing invertebrates, akin to the capybara of their realm, yet their significance surpasses mere charm.

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This year, researchers from Harvard Medical School, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, discovered that when the tardigrades are under stress, their bodies produce unstable free radicals of oxygen and an unpaired electron.

When the amino acid cysteine, which is used in protein production, comes into contact with these oxygen-free radicals, it becomes oxidized, triggering a signal that tells the tardigrade when it’s time to enter into the tun. When the researchers prevented the free radicals from reacting with cysteine, the tardigrades couldn’t enter tun, meaning the cysteine is likely a key to all tardigrades’ survival strategies.

Study co-author Leslie Hicks told New Scientist that, “Cysteine acts like a kind of regulatory sensor. It allows tardigrades to feel their environment and react to stress.”

The case vendor shows off a new prototype DK-07 desk with a transparent OLED screen that can display images atop your PC components.

IFixit went inside the Vision Pro to count every pixel.

A new type of ultra-sensitive sensor has been made to detect incredibly low levels of lead ions in water. This advanced sensor may pave the way for developing next-generation water quality monitoring systems.

What distinguishes the sensor is its capacity to detect lead ions at concentrations as low as one femtomole per liter of water, demonstrating an incredibly high degree of sensitivity.

According to the University of California, San Diego experts, this range is “one million times” more sensitive than any known sensing technologies for water contamination monitoring.

The novel tech should allow scientists and filmmakers to produce videos that accurately represent the colors seen by animals such as bees for the first time.

The past few decades have seen astonishing advances in imaging technology, from high-speed optical sensors that process over two million frames per second to tiny lensless cameras that record images using a single pixel.

In a study published in Advanced Materials, researchers from SANKEN (The Institute of Scientific and Industrial Research), at Osaka University have developed an optical sensor on an ultrathin, flexible sheet that can be bent without breaking. In fact, this sensor is so flexible, it will work even after it has been crumpled into a ball.

In a camera, the optical sensor is the device that senses the light that has passed through a lens, similar to the retina inside a human eye.