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Researchers at the University of South Florida have discovered a novel feedback pathway from the brain to the eye that modulates eye pressure – a significant advancement in the effort to diagnose and treat glaucoma. Glaucoma is associated with increased pressure in the eye due to a reduce ability of the eye to maintain proper fluid drainage. The heightened pressure applies mechanical strain to the optic nerve as the nerve exits the eye, resulting in vision loss and potential blindness.

Continue reading “Neuroscientists Discover Brain Pressure Controls Eye Pressure, Revealing New Avenues for Glaucoma Treatment” »

Some have called for caution with regards to China’s digital currency, with the urgency to rush through Beijing’s own plan now lessened as Libra, which is perceived by Beijing as a major threat to China’s financial sovereignty, faces major regulatory obstacles worldwide.

The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) stepped up its plan to launch a sovereign digital currency in response to Facebook’s Libra digital currency.

Continue reading “Shadow of doubt cast over China’s sovereign digital currency plan” »

New experiments addressed a decades-old theoretical question in physics, demonstrating that two realities can exist at the same time.

Cable Haunt lets attackers take complete control when targets visit booby-trapped sites.

IBS scientists and their colleagues have recently report an ultimate electrocatalyst that addresses all of the issues that trouble H₂O₂ production. This new catalyst comprising the optimal Co-N₄ molecules incorporated in nitrogen-doped graphene, Co₁-NG(O), exhibits a record-high electrocatalytic reactivity, producing up to 8 times higher than the amount of H₂O₂ that can be generated from rather expensive noble metal-based electrocatalysts.

Just as we take a shower to wash away dirt and other particles, semiconductors also require a cleaning process. However, its cleaning goes to extremes to ensure even trace contaminants “leave no trace.” After all the chip fabrication materials are applied to a silicon wafer, a strict cleaning process is taken to remove residual particles. If this high-purity cleaning and particle-removal step goes wrong, electrical connections in the chip are likely to suffer from it. With ever-miniaturized gadgets on the market, the purity standards of the electronics industry reach a level equivalent to finding a needle in a desert.

That explains why hydrogen peroxide (H₂O₂), a major electronic cleaning chemical, is one of the most valuable chemical feedstocks that underpins the chip-making industry. Despite the ever-growing importance of H₂O₂, its industry has been left with an energy-intensive and multi-step method known as the anthraquinone process. This is an environmentally unfriendly process which involves the hydrogenation step using expensive palladium catalysts. Alternatively, H₂O₂ can be synthesized directly from H₂ and O₂ gas, although the reactivity is still very poor and it requires high pressure. Another eco-friendly method is to electrochemically reduce oxygen to H₂O₂ a via 2-electron pathway. Recently, noble metal-based electrocatalysts (for example, Au-Pd, Pt-Hg, and Pd-Hg) have been demonstrated to show H₂O₂ productivity although such expensive investments have seen low returns that fail to meet the scalable industry needs.

A team of physicists has mapped how electron energies vary from region to region in a particular quantum state with unprecedented clarity. This understanding reveals an underlying mechanism by which electrons influence one another, termed quantum “hybridization,” that had been invisible in previous experiments.

The findings, the work of scientists at New York University, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Rutgers University, and MIT, are reported in the journal Nature Physics.

“This sort of relationship is essential to understanding a quantum electron system—and the foundation of all movement—but had often been studied from a theoretical standpoint and not thought of as observable through experiments,” explains Andrew Wray, an assistant professor in NYU’s Department of Physics and one of the paper’s co-authors. “Remarkably, this work reveals a diversity of energetic environments inside the same material, allowing for comparisons that let us spot how electrons shift between states.”

In the quantum realm, under some circumstances and with the right interference patterns, light can pass through opaque media.

This feature of light is more than a mathematical trick; optical quantum memory, optical storage and other systems that depend on interactions of just a few photons at a time rely on the process, called electromagnetically induced transparency, also known as EIT.

Because of its usefulness in existing and emerging quantum and optical technologies, researchers are interested in the ability to manipulate EIT without the introduction of an outside influence, such as additional photons that could perturb the already delicate system. Now, researchers at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis have devised a fully contained optical resonator system that can be used to turn transparency on and off, allowing for a measure of control that has implications across a wide variety of applications.

Stars have life cycles. They’re born when bits of dust and gas floating through space find each other and collapse in on each other and heat up. They burn for millions to billions of years, and then they die. When they die, they pitch the particles that formed in their winds out into space, and those bits of stardust eventually form new stars, along with new planets and moons and meteorites. And in a meteorite that fell fifty years ago in Australia, scientists have now discovered stardust that formed 5 to 7 billion years ago-the oldest solid material ever found on Earth.

“This is one of the most exciting studies I’ve worked on,” says Philipp Heck, a curator at the Field Museum, associate professor at the University of Chicago, and lead author of a paper describing the findings in PNAS. “These are the oldest solid materials ever found, and they tell us about how stars formed in our galaxy.”

A bad code update allowed anyone to easily reveal which accounts posted to Facebook Pages—including celebrities and politicians—for several hours.