Ceramic Nanofiber ‘Sponges’ Could be Used for Flexible Insulation, Water Purification
Researchers have found a way to make ultralight sponge-like materials from nanoscale ceramic fibers. The highly porous, compressible and heat-resistant sponges could have numerous uses, from water purification devices to flexible insulating materials. “The basic science question we tried to answer is how can we make a material that’s highly deformable but resistant to high…
Mini-Vessels, Mini-Brains Expand Disease Research Potential
Scientists have recently made a wondrous variety of mini-brains — 3-D cultures of neural cells that model basic properties of living brains — but a new finding could add to the field’s growing excitement in an entirely new “vein”: Brown University’s mini-brains now grow blood vessels, too. The networks of capillaries within the little balls…
Earth’s Orbital Variations and Sea Ice Synch Glacial Periods
Earth is currently in what climatologists call an interglacial period, a warm pulse between long, cold ice ages when glaciers dominate our planet’s higher latitudes. For the past million years, these glacial-interglacial cycles have repeated roughly on a 100,000-year cycle. Now a team of Brown University researchers has a new explanation for that timing and…
Sea Sponges Give Insight into Buckling Structures
Judging by their name alone, orange puffball sea sponges might seem unlikely paragons of structural strength. But maintaining their shape at the bottom of the churning ocean is critical to the creatures’ survival, and new research shows that tiny structural rods in their bodies have evolved the optimal shape to avoid buckling under pressure. The…
Graphene Templates Used to Create New Metal-Oxide Nanostructures
Researchers from Brown University have found a new method for making ultrathin metal-oxide sheets containing intricate wrinkle and crumple patterns. In a study published in the journal ACS Nano, the researchers show that the textured metal-oxide films have better performance when used as photocatalysts and as battery electrodes. The new findings build on previous work…
Researchers Developing New Interactive Sleep App
Machine Learning Technique Helps Identify Cancer Cell Types
National Institutes of Health, COBRE Center for Cancer Research Development at Rhode Island Hospital, Rhode Island Foundation Medical Research Grant, Jason and Donna McGraw Weiss Brown University researchers have developed a new image analysis technique to distinguish two key cancer cell types associated with tumor progression. The approach could help in pre-clinical screening of cancer…
Researchers Make Better Sense of Incoherent Light
One of the differences between lasers and desk lamps is that laser light is spatially coherent, meaning the peaks and valleys of the light waves are correlated with each other. The jumbled, uncorrelated waves coming from a desk lamp, on the other hand, are often said to be incoherent. That’s a bit of a misnomer,…
Imaging Brain Cells’ Reactions to Concussive Trauma
A team of Brown University researchers has been able to watch in real time what happens to neurons after they experience the kinds of forces involved in a blow to the head. Their findings, published in the journal Scientific Reports, could help scientists to understand how traumatic brain injury unfolds at the cellular level. The study…
Technique Could Help Climate Models Sweat The Small Stuff
A team of physicists and mathematicians has come up with a statistical technique that puts the fine details back into computer simulations of large-scale phenomena like air circulation in the atmosphere and currents in the ocean. Computer models are generally good at capturing the big picture, but they are often forced to ignore things that…