Tag: detect

New self-erasing chip could be used to detect counterfeit or tampered products

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A team of academics from the University of Michigan has developed self-powered and self-erasing chips that they hope could be used as an anti-counterfeit or tamper-detection system.

The new chips have been built with the help of a new material that changes its color while it temporarily stores energy.

The material consists of a three-atom-thick layer of semiconductor laid on top of a film of azobenzene molecules.

The semiconductor is known as “beyond graphene,” and has a special property that it can emit light when its molecules vibrate at certain frequencies.

When the two are combined, the azobenzene molecules pull on the “beyond graphene” semiconductor, causing it to vibrate in its special frequency range and emit light.

This reaction effectively allows academics to “write” visible messages on the chip itself.

However, azobenzene molecules also naturally shrink when in contact with ultraviolet light, such as the one found in normal sunlight,

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Stop Looking For An ‘Earth 2.0,’ Say Scientists As They Detect An Even Better ‘Superhabitable’ World

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Our planet is the best there is, right? Not necessarily, say researchers at Washington State University who have produced a list of 24 planets outside our Solar System that are not only Earth-like, but may even be better than Earth. 

The list—which is intended to be a “to do” list for a bunch of powerful telescopes due to go live in the next few years—includes planets that are older, a little larger, slightly warmer and possibly wetter than Earth, and which orbit stars with longer lifespans than our Sun. 

The researchers—whose work is published this week in the journal Astrobiology—think the worlds in the list contain some that could be called “super-habitable.” That means they could be places where life could more easily thrive than

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New technology may help detect COVID-19 in schools | Good News

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Is the election hurting your mental health? An expert weighs in

Less than 30 days out from one of the most divisive elections in American history, stress and anxiety around politics is an an all-time high. Yahoo Life Mental Health Contributor, Jen Harstein, says that it’s important to become aware of how your mental health could be taking a toll this election season.

“Even for those of us who have been part of many elections and voted many different times, this is something none of us have ever experienced,” she says.

Hartstein says one of the most important things you can do is create set times during the day to unplug. “We live in a 24 hour news cycle, and the news is coming at us all the time, and it’s intense,” Hartstein explains. “That doesn’t do such great things for our body’s ability to calm down, reset and relax.”

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Scientists detect ‘mass death’ of sea life off Russia’s Kamchatka

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A Greenpeace handout photo showing the area off Khalaktyr beach on the Kamchatka peninsula that may have been contaminated with
A Greenpeace handout photo showing the area off Khalaktyr beach on the Kamchatka peninsula that may have been contaminated with toxic chemicals

Pollution off the Pacific shoreline of the remote Kamchatka peninsula has caused the mass death of marine creatures, Russian scientists said Tuesday.


Locals sounded the alarm in late September as surfers experienced stinging eyes from the water and sea creatures including seals, octopuses and sea urchins washed up dead on the shore.

Coming on the heels of a massive oil leak in Siberia, the latest incident has sparked a large-scale investigation with fears that poisonous substances in underground storage since the Soviet era could have leaked into the water.

A team of divers from a state nature reserve found a “mass death” of sea life at a depth of five to 10 metres (16-33 feet), Ivan Usatov of the Kronotsky Reserve said, adding that “95 percent are dead.”

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Team aims to detect oxygen concentration in tumors using upgraded medical imaging scan — ScienceDaily

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Experts in Japan have devised a simple way to glean more detailed information out of standard medical imaging scans. A research team made up of atomic physicists and nuclear medicine experts at the University of Tokyo and the National Institute of Radiological Sciences (NIRS) has designed a timer that can enable positron emission tomography (PET) scanners to detect the oxygen concentration of tissues throughout patients’ bodies. This upgrade to PET scanners may lead to a future of better cancer treatment by quickly identifying parts of tumors with more aggressive cell growth.

“Patients’ experience in this future PET scan will be the same as now. Medical teams’ experience of conducting the scan will also be the same, just with more useful information at the end,” said nuclear medicine physician Dr. Miwako Takahashi from the NIRS, a co-author of the research publication in Communication Physics.

“This was a quick project for

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Inficon Announces System To Detect EV Battery Leaks That Could Lead To Fires

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A Swiss company says it’s come up with a process that could help prevent a real barrier for some consumers to buying an electric vehicle—fear that it may suddenly go up in flames. That’s what happened to a Tesla EV in April, 2019 in Shanghai while it sat in a parking garage. 

“That fire occurs because water gets into the cell and this reaction that happens is very volatile, sometimes can explode, catch on fire,” said Thomas Parker, North American

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Did NASA detect a hint of life on Venus in 1978 and not realize it?

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If life does exist on Venus, NASA may have first detected it back in 1978. But the finding went unnoticed for 42 years.

Life on Venus is still a long shot. But there’s reason to take the idea seriously. On Sept. 14, a team of scientists made a bombshell announcement in the journal Nature Astronomy: Using telescopes, they’d detected phosphine, a toxic gas long proposed as a possible sign of alien microbial life, in the upper part of the planet’s thick atmosphere. The detection was a landmark in the long hunt for life elsewhere in the solar system, which has mostly focused attention on Mars and a few moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn. Meanwhile, Venus, hot and poisonous, was long considered too inhospitable for anything to survive. But now, digging through archival NASA data, Rakesh Mogul, a biochemist at Cal Poly Pomona in California, and colleagues have found

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Energy Companies, Others Use Expanding Range Of Tools To Detect, Control Methane

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As energy companies strive to get their emissions of methane under control, they’re being joined in the fight by a loose coalition of academic institutions and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) employing a suite of tools that combine technological innovations, such as drones and satellite-based detection equipment, with advanced data analysis.

While past efforts to regulate the emissions of the potent greenhouse gas have focused on identifying the smaller leaks spewing from equipment at oil and gas operations sites, advanced methane-detection equipment, carried aloft by airplanes and satellites, is giving researchers as well as oil and gas operators the ability to track large plumes of methane across vast geographic areas.

In the meantime, the development of sophisticated continuous monitoring equipment, and the resultant decrease in cost of that equipment, is giving operators the ability to survey the air quality across entire oil fields, pinpointing the locations of any leaks that do occur.

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